UTM tracking from paid media, social or email campaigns can be tracked to help you optimize your campaigns
UTM tracking
Background
This document will go over some common UTM questions and give an overview of why UTM tracking is important to all potential clients.
What is a UTM Code
The UTM code is an Urchin Tracking Module that is used by most analytics tracking software including but not limited to google analytics, adobe analytics, etc. These codes are used to help keep track of the customers source, campaign , and medium. This information is quite useful in order to help associate a customer's buying habits with where they original came from. This can be used to help better understand where your marketing spend can be best utilized. Traditionally, UTM codes were used by media planners to track the effectiveness of their campaigns. Most media planners create a UTM code for each placement so they can monitor click-through and activity once the user lands on the target page.
Shoppable customers use UTM codes to not only track click-through but also the full closed-loop data associated with each user who clicks on a link with a UTM code from an ad, social media post, newsletter or video. Shoppable customers have used the closed loop tracking data to optimize creatives and media placements to drive higher e-commerce conversions and to understand at which merchant the shoppers purchased.
UTM codes should be used everywhere your advertisements or promotions are being placed and everywhere you are reaching out to prospective customers. This is including but not limited to paid/organic social, YouTube video, email marketing campaigns, programmatic advertising, social influencer campaigns, inter-brand/company websites.
Note: since UTM codes are universal and anyone can use them. This means that anyone who is redirecting traffic to your site or Shoppable® Ad Experience using a UTM will be tracked even if the UTM is not defined by you.
How to setup UTM Tracking
You can add parameters (such as utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign) to a URL to capture reporting data about the referring campaign. For example, the following link would allow you to identify the traffic to example.com that came from a particular email newsletter, as part of a particular campaign:
Most ad agencies have tools to help generate this information however you can always look at the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder for generating URLs to websites for assistance.
What do the parameters mean
Based on the previous section you may have a question about what are the utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign.
The utm_source is : the source of the information such as news
The utm_medium : is where the customer first interacted with the add this could be email, facebook, pinterest ect.
The utm_campaign: is how you group the particular ads together such as makeup_blast_2023_version_1
The naming convention is completely up to you but we highly recommend that the name, especially of the campaign, is meaningful and that you can easily act upon it. An example of a good name will consist of: the advertisement name followed by when it was first published and any versioning information that might be relevant. For example:
makeup_blast_april_2023_version_1
While on the other hand a less descriptive name might look like
mb_2023
Note: That the good one gives details that someone who might not be directly involved in the original advertisement creation process can easily decipher.
UTM and Shoppboard how do they work
Let’s take a look at how UTM codes are displayed within your shoppboard analytics:
In the Shoppable Dashboard we display the campaign name with the revenue generated for that particular campaign. This data comes from our analytics partner and to ensure the validity of this data the final totals are based on orders we know that have been either completed or cancelled while at the same time ignoring test orders.
Furthermore we do not allow for removal of UTM campaigns from our display this is to ensure that everything is being tracked properly and accurately. The good thing about this is that you will not need to inform Shoppable about any new UTMs that are added, they will just appear in your dashboard after prospective shoppers start interacting with that particular campaign.
Pixel tracking
You might want to track users within your own analytics systems or the source of the original UTM code might come from a source like Facebook or Instagram which requires pixel tracking of events in order to tie the data back to the dashboard of the advertising network.
Right now depending on the Shoppable integration you are using (Shoppable® Ad Experience or Shoppable® DTC Lite) there are two different ways to integrate pixel tracking.
Adding Pixel tracking
In order to track data within Shoppable® DTC Lite you will need to listen to certain events that are being transmitted back to the domain which you already own. These events include but are not limited to Add_to_cart, Remove_from_cart, Cart_found, as well as checkout tracking events.
Note: more in-depth details can be found here https://ask.shoppable.com/knowledge/how-to-setup-shoppable
In order to track data with in Shoppable® Ad Experience this is a bit different within the Shoppable® Ad Experience setup interface we have input fields that can be used to add the id of your tracking network at the moment we support : Twitter, Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Adsrvr, linqia, and Snapchat: