The real power of UTM and JTM tracking

From email marketing to social media, adverting, and search results, there are various channels that you can use to place the content in front of your target clients. So, how do you keep track of prospects’ interaction with your content?

One of the biggest challenges marketers are facing is tracking conversions correctly. A proper conversion tracking leads to a better understanding of how each marketing channel, campaign or ad is performing, and how to allocate the marketing budget and efforts to maximize results. Using UTM parameters is the best way to properly track conversions across multiple channels.

What are UTM parameters?

In a nutshell, UTM parameters are tags that you attach to the end of your URLs to track the progress of your marketing campaigns. When people click on the URL that has an adjoined UTM parameter, you can get insights for the channel that they used to access the content and their further engagement with it.

This is an example of UTM parameter in an URL that will appear after you click this Facebook post: https://blog.journy.io/the-right-marketing-for-the-right-marketer?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=customer-intelligence&utm_content=The+right+marketing+for+the+right+marketer+versionA

There are five UTM parameters that you can attach to your links:

• UTM source: Encapsulates the traffic source that in most of the cases is the platform on which you shared the link, for example, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and Gmail. (Above example was utm_source=Facebook)
• UTM medium: Includes the marketing medium that is closely related to the source. For instance, if you use Google as a source, the medium can be AdWords. (Above example was utm_medium=Social)
• UTM campaign: Underlines the campaign that you used to share the URL. You can name the campaign as you like, for example, “Clients Weekly Digest “Lead Nurturing Campaign” etc. (Above example was utm_campaign=customer-intelligence which coincide with the exact blog category)
• UTM term: In most cases, this parameter is used for advertising and seizes the term you bid on for sharing your URL. For example, you might bid on the term “Drip Marketing,” and consequently, “drip marketing” will be the UTM term.
• UTM content: A parameter that is used to determine the content that collected interaction when multiple elements from your ad promotion led to the click. This is especially useful if you A/B test more versions of your ad. (Above example was utm_content=The+right+marketing+for+the+right+marketer which coincide with the exact blog title)

Why UTM Parameters Matter for Your Marketing Campaign?

By using UTM parameters you can gauge the types of marketing campaigns that work and provide you with the insight needed for the ones that didn’t. Basically, there are 5 major benefits from using UTM parameters for your campaigns:

• Cross-Channel Tracking: You’ve just created a dedicated page and spent a significant amount on Facebook and Google Ads. Great! But, which one has the better ROI? What if 99% of your traffic comes from Facebook and only 1% from Google? With UTM parameters, you’ll know exactly which channel brings you long-term profits.
• Improving Your Channel Campaigns: When you track the channel’s ROI and monitor the campaign’s impact, you’ll have a clearer picture of what provides you with the best outcome. Now, you’ll be able to focus on improving the channel’s impact.
• A/B Testing: If you want to test two different CTAs because they both lead to the same link, you can use a UTM parameter. You can compare the engagement for both of your CTAs and determine where your target customers respond better.
• Influencer Marketing: When you pay a social media influencer to market your product, you want to know if he/she really gets clicked on or it’s just a person with a fake followers count. Creating a custom URL with UTM tags can help you track their ROI efforts.
• Banner Advertisement: If you pay other websites to include your banner ad, using UTM parameters is a must! You need to know which one brings in more profit. With UTM-based URLs you’ll know which websites to eliminate from your banner marketing strategy.

Why journy.io's JTM Tracking?

UTM tracking has been a standerd for more than a decade now and has definitely evolved to be the standard in tracking content, sources, and campaigns. However, putting everything in clear text has advantages as well as major security flaws.

Ease-of-reading is definitely a major pro...but then, so is URL spoofing and analytics faking as well. Once you see and know utm paramaters from a few ads, you can start cyber-attacking a company's web properties [not only through DDOS, but also] by feeding fake visitor data, which then eventually results in that company making bad ad investments.

Using an encrypted secured tag management parameter—only one(1) parameter indeed to replace all 5 UTM parameters—only(!) usable for target URLs, allows for a more secure environment. Such JTM parameter could look like: https://blog.journy.io/the-right-marketing-for-the-right-marketer?jtm=224A-AD23-AA17-5621-AB28 and can still be used in conjuction with legacy utm parameters for older types of analytics software (e.g. Google Analytics)

journy.io supports both jtm and utm parameters.

How to make data-driven decisions with UTM/JTM parameters?

So now you know how to create links with JTM or UTM parameters, how to see their results, and why it is an absolute must to do so. All that remains is to actually use this data and make smarter decisions. Indeed, by linking these paramater(s) to business outcomes such as deal won, deal lost, or deal won but churned after 2 months...you can use data to decide:

• to eliminate low performing marketing channels.
• to boost social media channels for best performing campaigns.
• to drop USPs and non-performing campaigns.

You can expose your UTM/JTM parameter(s) results in journy.io.