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What Are Google Analytics UTM Links and How to Easily Use Them For Tracking?

I love google analytics. It’s the best free reliable tracking tool on the planet. Who knows!? Google may actually take your data and use them for their own evil empire. Who cares! I don’t. Google Analytics rocks!

What are Google Analytic UTM Tags?

Google UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) tags allow you to add extra information to you the link you create.  This extra information appears in the Google Analytics reports under Traffic Sources. Source

So here’s a neat little trick you can use to track unique links without using any other 3rd party tracking tools like prosper202 or whatever.  

Here are some sample normal links.

http://mydomain.com

or 

http://mydomain.com/whatever.php

or

http://mydomain.com/folder/

To use google analytics UTM links, I would simply add the following to the end of my URL

?utm_source=SOURCE&utm_medium=NAME

So for this example, I bought a gig on fiverr that will promote my link on a facebook fanpage (Case Study coming soon!).

So I named my link like this:

http://mydomain.com/whatever.php?utm_source=fiv&utm_medium=fanpage

I replaces the parameter utm_source= with fivfor fiverr, and utm_medium with fanpage for facebook fanpage.

After the fiverr gig is completed, here’s what is shown in my analytics stats for this particular UTM link. You can see this under “Acquisition”, all traffic.

track-links-in analytics utm

So if you were to have a bunch of different UTM links, it’ll all show here. You can have UTM links for whatever campaigns or promos you are running such as buying banner ads on somebody’s website, forum signature links, or whatever.

Check out Google’s very own UTM Builder

How cool are UTM links!?

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9 Comments

  1. Although the concept is not explained clearly, still I got some idea by reading the post. And I think, its about optimizing dynamic URLs that are generated especially in eCommerce sites while using search or display filters.

    But the post is not made much effective so as to understand the matter easily. It’s still confusing the what is that “Google analytic UTM link”.

    My friend Webmaster (Post author), please update the post by making it more clear to understand.

    1. Thank you for asking. There are more advanced usage for UTM links which I will not get into. I’m only using UTM links for tracking when I buy advertisements. Other than that, I really don’t use UTM for anything else like an ecommerce shop as you’ve mentioned. Thanks again.

    1. Thank you for buying my WSO. You can use prosper202 to track the PPC campaigns. But it’s not neccessary as you can already use the tracking right from the PPC platform. Check the Penny Per Click FAQs page for more info on setting up the tracking.

  2. Great post!
    I was not aware of UTM links. That’s great to hear about it.

    I love Google analytics too. Its free and most reliable tracking tool than others. UTM links are good if you are doing a special promotional campaign.

    Well, i found this post on http://www.kingged.com and commented on it.

    Have a nice day!

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