Company Update
Strategy
UTM Tags and Your Facebook Campaigns
Mar 31, 2017
Strategy
Mar 31, 2017
Do you know what ad set and/or ad creative is driving the most traffic and business to your website? It would be helpful to use an advanced tracking option that keeps you on top of your marketing campaign that drives maximum traffic to your website.
Do you know what ad set and/or ad creative is driving the most traffic and business to your website? It would be helpful to use an advanced tracking option that keeps you on top of your marketing campaign that drives maximum traffic to your website. That’s why UTM tags will become your best friends. How do you use UTM tags in combination with your Facebook campaigns?
UTM tags are simply an addition to the destination URL of your ads, which allow you to track traffic from your Facebook and/or Instagram campaigns and send it to Google Analytics for campaign performance tracking.
URL parameters on your advertising campaigns are vital for two reasons: first, they help you identify where your advertising traffic is coming from. Second, insights from URL parameters can show which link people clicked to get to your advertising campaign’s target destination (e.g. Facebook Page or website). So, in other words, you need to tag your Facebook campaigns to track what specific campaign element triggered most of your traffic. Campaign tagging means adding parameters to the end of your landing page URL to identify the source. Here is what it looks like:
https://www.tnasuite.com/thenextad-news/utm-tags-and-your-facebook-campaigns
https://www.tnasuite.com/thenextad-news/utm-tags-and-your-facebook-campaigns?utm_source=social&utm_medium=organic_linkedin&utm_campaign=03302017&utm_content=UTM-tags
Note: Although you can add URL parameters to your advertisements on Facebook, you’ll need to use a third-party analytics tool to track the results like Google Analytics.
If you stay consistent when creating names for your UTMs, you can avoid a lot of confusion and ensure that your UTMs are reportable. Stay consistent with lowercase throughout all of your campaigns. Changing to uppercase gives you an additional chore of having to remember this convention. So, it’s better to stay consistent and use lower case and not let human error creep in.
Keep your URLs clean, descriptive, non-redundant and easy to read. For example, you might be putting the same values inside source and medium parameters. Or, you can put the specific originating aspect under medium but still manage to confuse yourself with the double use of ‘facebook’. Also, the UTM parameters are visible to your users in their address bars. So, be transparent and don’t use values that you don’t want them to see.
Connect your tracking data with your CRM. It shows you a clear picture of how various online marketing channels are affecting your bottom line. This will help you to get an idea of your actual revenue.
Keep a record of the tagged links to ensure that your marketing team stays on the same page. Create a naming convention guide document that lays out clear instructions for tagging links.
This happens way too often, even with larger advertisers.
Let’s say the medium for paid traffic is sometimes tagged as ‘paid’ or ‘cpc’ or ‘cpm’ or ‘ad’ or not at all for the same ad channel, then it is really difficult to see the impact of your advertising campaign as the data is not aggregated correctly.
Be aware that URL tags are case sensitive, so ‘cpc’ and ‘CPC’ are treated differently. Make sure you have a convention for how to use cases.
For example, to distinguish between different types for Facebook traffic you could set the source to ‘facebook-post’ for page posts you create, ‘facebook-ads’ for Facebook ads. But that is not how they are meant to be used and thus you will not see information in the right way in Google Analytics. The source should simply be facebook (or facebook.com if you want to use that as your convention) and the post and paid identifier should be put in the medium tag where it belongs. This way you can see the information correctly in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics struggles with identifying your actual campaign if you use long campaign names, campaigns that start with the same phrase, and campaigns that don’t follow a naming convention.
Don’t put UTM tags on links from your own website that lead to other pages on your website. Google Analytics can in fact track traffic within your site without any URL tagging. More crucially, if you add UTM tracking parameters on internal links you’ll lose information on where the traffic originally came from.
It is quite common for websites to have sub-domains such as blog.website.com or app.website.com. If you don’t explicitly tell Google Analytics they are all the same website it will interpret them as separate properties. This means you will see traffic from your own domains in your Google Analytics account. A typical example is when visitors click a link on Facebook to your blog and after reading the blog post click on to your main site. Without the proper setup, Google Analytics will interpret the source of the traffic as blog.website.com when it, in fact, was Facebook.
By now, you’ll be convinced that UTM parameters give you extremely valuable insights about your traffic – if keeping the do’s and don’ts in mind. With these insights of your audience’s behaviour, you can boost your sales and refine your overall marketing effort.
If you have any questions about your Facebook or Google analytics data, please feel free to drop us a chat in the app or by sending an email to success@tnasuite.com. We will be happy to discuss the best way of analysing your campaigns.