{"id":34144,"date":"2017-11-14T20:28:31","date_gmt":"2017-11-15T02:28:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crazyeggblog.wpengine.com\/?p=34144"},"modified":"2026-01-06T15:14:49","modified_gmt":"2026-01-06T23:14:49","slug":"utm-codes-guide-with-examples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crazyegg.com\/blog\/utm-codes-guide-with-examples\/","title":{"rendered":"9 Real UTM Tracking Codes – And How to Create You Own"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Our traffic bounces all over the place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have social. We have email. We have paid ads. There\u2019s more sites, platforms, and networks than we could possibly hope to run our campaigns on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do we keep track of it all?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do we know what\u2019s working and what\u2019s not?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We use UTM codes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s a UTM?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

UTM stands for Urchin tracking parameters<\/em><\/strong>. They\u2019re little pieces of data that we add to our URLs in order to see where different traffic comes from. They were introduced way back with an analytics tool called Urchin, the tool that was bought by Google and evolved into Google Analytics. Somewhere along the way, they became the industry standard for tracking marketing campaigns across tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These days, most analytics tools, marketing apps, marketing automation tools, and CRMs look for these parameters automatically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are five standard parameters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UTM Medium:<\/b> Think of this as a channel. Social, Organic, Paid, Email, Affiliates, are all core marketing channels that include multiple traffic sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UTM Source:<\/b> The individual site within that channel. For example, Facebook would be one of the sources within your Social medium for any unpaid links that you post to Facebook. If you\u2019re running a Facebook ad or spending money to promote a link, you\u2019d want to label Facebook as a source within Paid. If you\u2019re building a link for email, define which list that you\u2019re sending the email to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UTM Campaign: <\/b>The specific campaign that you\u2019re running. Feel free to fill this in however it makes sense to you. Names that allow you to easily identify product launches<\/strong>, promotional campaigns, individual emails or posts, etc. are all good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UTM Content:<\/b> This is an optional field. If you have multiple links in the same campaign, like two links in the same email, you can fill in this value so you can differentiate them. For most marketers, this data is more detailed than they really need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UTM Term:<\/b> Marketers rarely use this field these days. It\u2019s so you can track specific keywords<\/strong> for paid organic campaigns. Since AdWords has it\u2019s own tracking methodology and a deep integration with Google Analytics, you\u2019ll rarely need to use this field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whenever you put a link on an external site (not your own site, more on this below), you add these parameters to your URL<\/strong>. Then when traffic lands on your site, you know where the visitor came from and that data appears in all your marketing and analytics tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s a normal URL without any tracking:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

www.yoursite.com\/pricing<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And here\u2019s the same URL with four UTM parameters added:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

www.yoursite.com\/pricing?utm_source=active%20users&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=feature%20launch&utm_content=bottom%20cta%20button<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this hypothetical example, we have a set of active users for a product that are going to receive an email. The campaign isn’t set to every email subscriber on file, only users that are defined as “active.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s break down each individual element of this URL to really understand it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n