Why do we need UTM codes?

You want to measure everything in digital, particularly the traffic from campaigns.

Web analytics tools, like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Matomo or Piano, can identify where each visitor has come from (the referring domain) but they won't know what campaign or what creative the visitor clicked on.

Adservers report well on ad performance, but give a very limited view of the visitors' path to conversion.

Ad platforms, like Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Linkedin, are similar. And so are email marketing platforms and social media analytics platforms.

This makes it hard to compare performance across campaigns and between channels.

UTM codes make this possible.

With the demise of cookies and the rise of privacy legislation, there are fewer accurate ways of tracking performance from one platform to another.

UTM codes are like the synapses in a digital brain; little connections from your advertising to the Google Analytics on your website or in your mobile app, transferring data about the marketing that has made that visitor click through.

Nothing else can track journeys across all types of media - little will get you as close to an end-to-end view of marketing performance.