To improve the effectiveness of Email newsletters, it is important to regularly analyse statistics. You need to look not only at how subscribers open and read emails, but also at conversion rates for website click-throughs and orders. This article discusses how Utm Tags can help with this and how to use them correctly in email newsletters.
What are UTM Tags and why do we need them?
UTM tags are special tags that are added to the URL (link) of a website or page to gather information about traffic sources.
This is what a link with UTM tags looks like
UTM tags are needed to track who clicked on a link to a website. According to them, marketingas define the source of traffic: contextual advertising, targeting or email-notifications. When the links are properly marked up, the reports show not only the source (email), but also the specific issues and even individual links in the email that users clicked on.
Reports show the number of clicks from the mailing lists and basic behavioural metrics for clicked users, such as bounce rate and time on site. If you have goals set up, you can also see the number, conversion rate and cost of conversions. And with end-to-end analytics, you can track the effectiveness of mailings across the entire customer journey from email opening to first and repeat purchases.
In order to pass the information to web analytics systems, you need to specify the variable values for each tag and add them at the end of the link after the “?” with an “&” sign. Between the label and the value put a sign “=”, like this:
site.ru/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=digest&utm_campaign=february22
Usually, three mandatory and two optional UTM tags are used to track link clicks.
Required UTM tags
UTM_SOURCE – identifies the source of traffic, such as yandex, social or email. If the link is in an email, it makes sense to specify “utm_medium=email”. In the case when the link is in a blog – “utm_medium=blog” and so on by analogy.
UTM_MEDIUM – shows the type of traffic. Here you can specify the source of the traffic: from triggered, transactional or news mailing. A variant for trigger mailing is “utm_source=trigger”, for newsletter – “utm_source=newsletter”, for transactional – “utm_source=transaction”. This is not a mandatory rule, call the tags as convenient and understandable to you.
UTM_CAMPAIGN – passes information about a particular campaign. It is usually used to identify individual emails in an email campaign. For example, if you are running a mailing with a 30% discount coupon, you could label the tag as “utm_campaign=kupon30”. Choose informative and easy-to-understand names to help differentiate one newsletter from another.
Additional UTM tags
UTM_TERM – identifies the keyword used to show the ad. This tag is usually used in campaigns with paid keyword traffic, such as Yandex.Direct. And since it is not required, it is not placed in email newsletters.
UTM_CONTENT – shows ad contents or link content. In advertising campaigns, it helps to compare the effectiveness of two ads, while in email marketing it helps you determine which link users clicked more frequently within one email. The tag is useful for split testing. For instance, one link is embedded in a banner, the other in a button. On the first link we put “utm_content=banner”, the second “utm_content=button”. And then we track the results.
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