What is going on, everybody? I hope all is well. So what I’ve been working on today is creating UTM links, we do hundreds of these a month for all of our campaigns, for our internal projects as well as clients. Now I wanted to show you my favorite free tool for getting that done, just for a quick explainer.
UTM links attribute marketing campaigns to specific things that you’re doing. So if you have one landing page–and I’ll show you an example–that one landing page like right here, for example, this was for our client, Kiddie Credit.
We have one landing page here–which is a form, but as you can see, we have three different UTM campaigns. What that means is, we have one link with different modifiers on it, so that we know where traffic is coming from.
So we have one of those forms on the website, you can see here, we have one of the forms on Instagram and then we have one of the forms—just a general link that goes straight to the form. Now, the reason for this is so that we can track our efforts and analytics, to see on average which area and which item they’re spending the most time on.
We use utm.io, because it is the quickest and easiest way. You can traditionally do this with a Google Analytics URL builder. But essentially, to recap everything I just discussed, this is how we can track our efforts through analytics with the same link.
So I’m going to walk you through it, I have some directions here to help me out as well.
So yes, use UTM tracking for every campaign, you can sign up for utm.io by going to web.utm.io. It is absolutely free, they do have a paid option as well, but I’m going to show you how to really use the free version.
I do recommend the paid one, it’s a lot easier, but I’m going to show you the free one as well. Or you can install the Chrome extension here, which will essentially walk you through the same process, you can click that link below.
Step one, you’re going to click to the page that you want to track. So for us, this example is we want to be able to track our efforts to this beta test or form. So I’m going to go to the form.
Now usually with tracking analytics efforts, you want to make sure that you’re on the main domain. So our main domain is kiddiecredit.com. However, we’ve added analytics attributes to this type form, so we’re picking up analytical data here.
Now you don’t want to be tracking, say, facebook.com/apple, you’re not going to be able to track the attributes properly, because that info is not going to drop it to analytics. So you have to have analytics access to the website that you’re tracking.
Now that we have this link here, all I’m going to do is open up here, let me sign in. Okay, so once I’m signed in, here’s the actual URL, you can actually create templates as well. I’ll show you how to do that here.
So this template's name is called KK Beta Test Form, right? And then the Campaign, you can put the campaign name; the Medium, which is going to be email; the Source, which is going to be MailChimp. And then you can put Terms, Content, and Notes.
I usually just fill out Campaign for the most part. So we’re just going to put 1 here, that way we can at least test it and then save it.
Now when I go here to Template, I can just hit drop down, and I can click it here, and it’ll pre-populate most of that information. So after that’s done, I have my link here, right? Now it’s a long form link, right?
It's super long, so if we’re going to be sharing this, we want to make this a short link. Go back here–also if you leave the page it does disappear, so that’s a good one to know. Go back here, I have my info, okay.
Now I’m going to hit the shortener, and I’m going to use Bitly. Bitly is just a shortener that you can use to make long links smaller. It’s absolutely free, so just sign up for Bitly, put in your username, you’ll get an API key and walk through this process.
And then it’s going to give you that link, which I’m going to drop in here.
So this is our main Bitly here, right? Now to look at your information, now that you have your new link, it’s a super easy process, because all this information is automatically going to be dropped into analytics.
So anytime someone comes to this form, they feel out the information, that information is going to automatically push to Google analytics. If I go there, to Google analytics, I sign in.
Okay. And then all you have to do in the search bar is hit Campaign, just go to All Campaigns and it’ll show you our campaigns across the board. And I can see that today we’ve had 32 users come to the site to check out that test form.
Now we also put a Thank You Page as well. It’s been a few hours, so we haven’t had that data propagated. But essentially, everything that you track here in UTM builder will show here, without any effort, you just create that link and you’re ready to go.
Now, utm.io will host all of your links here, within their platform, but they only do it for about 30 days. Unless you have the unlimited link history, which is–I think–$7 a month. If you want to bypass that, you could always create a spreadsheet like we do and have everything there ready to go.
That’s it guys, I know that was a lot in a quick session, but I wanted to provide some value while I was working, and I hope you enjoyed it.
