Any digital business is interested in knowing where its traffic comes from , this will allow it to optimize its marketing strategies and their applications to specific campaigns.

To solve this problem, Google makes available to us the UTM ( Urchin Tracking Module ) or Urchin Traffic Monitoring, which is the name of the analytics tool that Google acquired and on which Google Analytics was built.

UTMs are tags created to improve the attribution of the traffic that a website receives or in other words, to see at a very detailed level in Google Analytics where the user accesses and how they behave . This allows us to know exactly where users are visiting us from and also to more accurately measure the performance of a campaign .

We can create custom urls , adding different types of utm tags through Google's custom url creation tool or generating our own custom tagging guide. This way you can add the tags you need to measure the traffic that a certain campaign gets.

Google provides 5 types of utm tags, three mandatory and two optional, which must be added to the end of the link with which you can know the origin of the click.

The types of utm are:

• utm_source (mandatory): is responsible for measuring the source of the campaign, that is, where we have published the campaign or from where the user has found us.
• utm_medium (mandatory): It is the medium of the campaign through which the user has accessed.
• utm_campaign (mandatory): The name assigned to the campaign to identify it.
• utm_content (optional): Used to differentiate different ads or links that point to the same url. Its most common use is for A/B testing .
• utm_term (optional): Typically used for paid searches. You can include the campaign keyword.

For example: A sports store wants to launch soccer shoes for children for the start of school. You decide to create a post on Facebook where you want to enter the campaign link. The utm should then look like this:

https://wwwdominio.com/utm_source=facebook&utm=medium=social&utm_campaign=vuelta_al_cole&utm_content=zapatillas_futbol_niño

UTMs embedded in links apply to the entire session. It means that from the moment the click occurs on a specific event until the conversion is carried out or the set objective is met, everything that happens in the process can be attributed to the different traffic sources through which we have decided to launch the different campaigns.

Why use utm tags for my ecommerce

Nowadays it is almost mandatory for a digital business with a website to have an Analytics account, since it will collect valuable information about the traffic that the website receives and will allow us to make more accurate decisions based on data.

The use of utm's will also provide information on the user's behavior in the different campaigns that we carry out in the different media. For example, if there are several active campaigns with different products, we will be able to measure which of them bring us the most traffic , and most importantly, we will also be able to know if that traffic manages to reach conversion through the application of objectives.

If we carry out email marketing campaigns, for social networks or banners on blogs, we will be able to know which one works best by the amount of traffic that comes from each of these sources and the impact they obtain on the overall performance of our site.

Having visibility of the impact of each of our campaigns allows us to correct the strategy quickly and thus optimize our advertising investment.

How to apply utm codes in an ecommerce

Its application is simple, first of all it will be necessary to have a Google Analytics account that collects all the information about the website.

On the other hand, although the ideal is to generate a personalized strategy adapted to your business, Google has a free tool to create campaign urls, in which we can generate the utm tags and incorporate them into the URLs, they would be ready to incorporate them into our campaigns.

Once the final url has been incorporated into the campaign, it will be in Google Analytics where the information on the personalized links will be collected.

Simply enter the Acquisition > All traffic > Source/Medium section and search for Campaign in the Secondary Dimension drop-down menu.

In that table you can see where the traffic comes from where the campaigns have been carried out. This will allow you to carry out the strategic measures that you consider appropriate.

Now you know that the use of utm will considerably improve the measurement of traffic on your website.