What are UTM codes?

You might have heard them referred to as marketing codes, campaign codes, tracking links, CID codes (in Adobe Analytics), or query string parameters. In Google Analytics they are known as UTM codes.

A UTM is a small piece of tracking code that goes after your landing page URL, which tells your analytics platform where the user came from.

All marketing activity linking visitors to your website (or mobile app) should use a unique tracking code, to understand marketing performance.

UTMs may look something like this:

https://www.website.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=january_sale

Before the question mark, you will see the URL of your landing page: https://www.website.com/

People often forget to check the URL is live, and so end up driving expensive traffic to an error page. But link management platforms, like Uplifter, will check that the landing page is loading properly and has the correct analytics tags on it.

After the question mark, you will see three parameters: utm_source utm_medium and utm_campaign. These dimensions can be used to group together marketing activity to report on performance.

Parameters are labels that identify values after the equals sign, in this case, facebook, social and january_sale.

You can learn more about parameters here.