Mastering UTM Parameters: Best Practices for Effective Tracking

All right, so what are the best practices for using UTM parameters? Consistency. Use consistent naming conventions for UTM parameters to ensure accurate tracking and reporting. So that's getting back to the example with the spring sale, right? If you kept that approach, then when it's a fall sale, it would be fall, actually, a sale.

If it's a holiday sale, if it's a, you know, a, you know, men's apparel, if you just make sure you keep, similar, I mean, it's very simple, a simplified notion could obviously, a company may have a whole bunch of sales going in a given period of time, but you have to come up with a way of consistently tracking that. Avoid overuse. Only use UTM parameters when necessary.

Overuse can clutter URLs and make them difficult to manage, right? So, all that information is always necessary. Some of it is already being reported from other sources. So make sure you need it particularly in this particular, for these particular reasons, and just use the ones that are most relevant, right? Use short and descriptive names.

Keep your parameter value short, but descriptive to make them easily identifiable in reports. You could get unwieldy with long descriptions for your campaigns, long descriptions, you know, et cetera. If UTM tag URLs become too long and unwieldy, consider using a URL shortener to keep them manageable.

And there are tools that will enable you to shorten your URL so it doesn't look, you know, like this, plus, you know, or five of them, and, you know, long campaign name, you know, long, long keywords, right? So you want to, you know, that is a tool that can be used. Okay. So, building a URL and parameters, separate the parameters from the URL with a question mark.

You see, you know, this example, example.com, with a question mark right after that. List the parameters and values as pairs separated by an equal sign, right? So UTM source equals email, separate each parameter value pair with an ampersand, rather than what I meant to say. The parameters and values are pairs separated by an equal sign.

So, you know, the parameter is UTM source, the value equals email. And then the actual parameter value pair, meaning, you know, the source equal email is separated by medium equal email by the ampersand. So you're using equal signs and ampersands, and it's case sensitive, right? If you were to, in one case, have a summer sale with a capital S and the next time you have a, with a small S, when, you know, when you append it, it's not going to know that that's the same thing.

So it's case sensitive. So keep it all the same case, right? It's a URL builder that could show a URL. All right.

So that takes us to the end. I also have an activity at the end and it's a little more detailed that you can do, identify the top three traffic sources that we discussed, and then also navigate to engagement, find the three most visited page, analyze engagement time and bonus and bounce rate, suggest why they might be performing well, but also go to demographics, identify the top country and age groups of visitors, discuss how the audience profile impacts marketing strategy. So what you want to do is the first step, which is knowing where to get the information, right? And the second step is understanding what that information is telling you.

And then the final step is how to take that insight and use it to improve your marketing strategy. If more, you know, if you're seeing some regions that are, you know, overperforming in terms of sales compared to their population size or even shape of visits, then you might want to focus on those areas with an advertising campaign because it could be in top demand there, right? And then ecommerce performance, navigate to monetization, and identify the best-selling product categories, suggest strategies to improve sales for underperforming products. So maybe the products that are doing the best are the ones that are featured, you know, on the main page, on the homepage, or the ones that are featured at the top of the homepage.

And so if you want to improve a product, maybe it's just placing it there, right? So it's looking at that information and, you know, seeing how that relates to how that, you know, product might be presented, the views that product page is getting, and seeing if there are ways to optimize that, seeing how, you know, what might be driving the best product that you have and seeing, you know, if any of that could be applied to products that aren't doing as well. Or maybe, you know, using this to weed out, you know, stop promoting or having space for products that are not doing as well, and prioritize other products instead, right? So all of these are, you know, considerations based upon what the numbers tell you. Okay, that concludes the Google Analytics Bootcamp.

I hope you entrust that you've learned, you know, enough over these past few hours or so to be comfortable going, you know, knowing how to set up the Google Analytics account, understanding the information that's available, understanding, you know, the significance of events and how to identify key events, knowing which information events might be there already for you, what reports you can easily access and, you know, what's being tracked in reports, which audiences you can build and how to build audiences, right? So the only way that you are going to be, you know, mastered is that if you get started and just on a regular basis review the information, and most importantly, see how that information can be translated to optimizing your marketing programs. Thank you.