Email UTM parameters can be a game-changer for measuring the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Without them, you won’t know which channel (paid, social, referral, direct, organic, etc.) is driving success—and it’s hard to scale or optimize your campaigns without attribution.
Your marketing campaigns involve countless hours of planning, strategizing, content creation, execution, and management. But these efforts, while valuable, will only get you so far. Real-time data is the crucial ingredient when it comes to tracking success and refining your campaign.
There are numerous metrics in place to help you track user engagement with your emails. A few common examples include:
Open rate
Click-through rate
Click-to-open rate
Unsubscribe rate
These metrics all capture what’s happening within an email, which is the first half of the story. Beyond that, you need to understand what people are doing after the all-important click because that’s where campaigns rise to truly business-boosting levels. Gathering these post-click metrics requires UTM email tracking.
Sometimes referred to as a campaign parameter or UTM code, a UTM parameter is text that goes at the end of a clickable link in your email.
If you’re wondering where the term “UTM” comes from, it’s a throwback to a tracking tool called “Urchin” that was developed back in the late nineties. After the company was acquired by Google and rebranded as Google Analytics, they retained the original phrasing used in the tracking codes.
Hence, nearly three decades after its creation, we still use “Urchin Tracking Modules” for even the most sophisticated of campaigns.
You might have noticed UTM parameters in action when clicking links within advertisements or online articles. The first thing that gives them away is the length of the link, as it typically extends beyond what you would normally expect. Second, they always include a tell-tale question mark.
While we’re accustomed to using question marks at the end of sentences to denote a query, the symbol is used at the very beginning of UTM parameters to separate it from the standard link.
Let’s say that you own an ad agency called Olmec Advertising. On your website is a popular page called Our Services, which lays out all the ways your agency helps clients succeed. The normal URL for this page is https://www.olmecadvertising.com/services.
When you send out marketing emails, however, you use UTM parameters to help you see how email recipients engage with your website after clicking the link. So the link used in the email might look like this:
Yes, that’s a somewhat clunky-looking URL. But don’t worry, because your email recipients won’t see it within the email.
It’s the necessary tradeoff in order to gain the right data about your campaign. A person who clicks the link will be directed to your Our Services page just like anyone who landed on the page from paid search, display ads, organic search, or some other source.
What matters is that your analytics platform will be able to track their individual actions and connect them to your email campaign.
Email UTM parameters are essential for certain marketing efforts because there’s no way to know if something is working unless you can clearly analyze it. For example, let’s say that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) identifies two bus stops that are in high-traffic areas but are hardly being used by passengers. The MBTA theorizes that the low usage at these stops is because they are in disrepair and don’t have adequate rain shelter.
After crews expand and update the bus stops, the MBTA begins tracking the total number of passengers on the buses that have routes that include those stops. The early data shows a passenger increase of 10% along those routes, prompting MBTA leaders to dub the project a success and announce plans to update dozens of other stops in a similar way.
But they need to pump the brakes a bit.
The MBTA’s data failed to track passenger entry points, so they really had no idea where the increases were coming from. When they begin tracking the number of passengers entering at each stop, it becomes clear that the two stops actually didn’t see a spike in passengers. Rather, the increases came from a stop located near a large business that had issued a return-to-office rule for all their previously remote employees and a stop near a nursing college that had recently doubled its student body.
As you can see, aggregated data can be misleading. The only way to know how well your campaigns are performing is to track how people are engaging with the individual elements of your marketing.
Using UTM codes, you’ll be able to track all the actions that happen (or don’t happen) after a person clicks a link within your email. Want data on sessions, page views, conversions, and revenue? You’ll get all that and more.
These data-capturing codes also help you refine individual elements within a larger campaign. For example, you can go beyond simply knowing that a website visitor came from the second email in your campaign by seeing which version of that email spurred their action. This clarity is crucial for your A/B testing, allowing you to identify which images and CTA copy drive the best results.
Thanks to the insights from your UTM codes, you might discover that 15% more users clicked the email version that included a scenic beach photo rather than the one that featured a photo of an entrepreneur working in an office. The internal tracking within your email platform would reinforce this data, leading many marketers to declare the beach photo version the winner…and possibly add beach photos to their other emails.
But the added scope of UTM codes might reveal a surprise: although fewer people clicked on the email with the entrepreneur photo, those users converted at a much higher rate. While people seemed to enjoy the beach photo, the “quality over quantity” component would make the entrepreneur photo the clear winner.
And you never would have reached this conclusion using the standard metrics that only track what a user does within an email.
There is a set of five UTM parameters to choose from in Google Analytics. The three most popular are source, medium, and name. This trio is used essentially every time you set up tracking on a link, while the final two are optional. Let’s take a closer look:
This code tracks inbound web traffic so that you can delineate visitors from specific emails, blog posts, social media platforms, and other potential sources. If it were from your email newsletter, the code might be “utm_source=august_newsletter.”
While the campaign source code looks at the exact piece of content that prompted the user to take action, the campaign medium pulls back to look at the broader channel it falls under. So instead of specifying Facebook, it would simply be “social media.” Using the email newsletter example from above, the code might be “utm_medium=email.”
Each campaign or initiative launched by your business should be given a name that is recognizable to your team. No, this doesn’t mean you need to call your drip campaign “Robert” or “Felicia.” Rather, the name would refer to its purpose, structure, or theme. Examples might include “welcome_series,” “welcome_wagon,” or simply “drip_campaign.”
Here’s where you can A/B test your emails and other campaign pieces. If you had two links pointing to the same webpage and wanted to see if more people clicked the hyperlinked version with the text or the button version at the bottom of the email, you could use “utm_content=hyperlink” and “utm_content=button.” These individual components of the email would then be tracked separately, enabling you to learn more about your user’s preferences and habits.
This last UTM tag is often attached to paid search ads to identify the paid keywords that are being used. It has less relevance for email campaigns. If you were to use it for ads promoting your new accounting software and you’re targeting the keyword “business accounting software,” the code might look like this: utm_term=business_accounting_software
Running cohesive and organized marketing campaigns requires more than just a good team. You need a reliable platform that can streamline the creation of emails, manage the execution, and then provide tracking and support on the back end.
With Twilio SendGrid, you get industry-leading deliverability rates and a full suite of tools to make your life easier. Our experts can help you build campaigns that not only get noticed but also drive results.
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