UTM parameters are used to track the success and control online marketing campaigns and work like labels that are attached to each prospect gained through an online campaign.
They are added to the URL of the landing pages as GET variables and enable a detailed analysis of the customer journey.
UTM parameters can be used, for example, to see which campaign and which keyword referred a prospective customer to the contact form.
UTM Paramenter can also be used in integrated data management to determine ROI across systems. We have summarized details on this in a blog post: Calculating the ROI of online campaigns with seamless data integration.
The five most important UTM parameters and their roles:
| Parameters | Function |
|---|---|
| utm_term | Identification of paid keywords |
| utm_campaign | Identification of the campaign used to generate the traffic |
| utm_source | Identification of the source of the traffic, for example a search engine or a social network |
| utm_medium | Identification of the advertising/marketing medium, e.g., a wall post, email, or social ad |
| utm_content | Individual contents of a campaign can be separated from each other and identified via this parameter |
How exactly the UTM-Paramenter is used, Google Support has summarized excellently: Collect campaign data with custom URLs