Understanding UTM Parameters: Tracking User Origins in Google Analytics (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: UTM parameters are essential for answering the question, where did my user come from? Have you noticed when you enter the website that there's a long tail at the end of the URL? What you see after the question mark is called a query string, and it communicates important information about where the users that just entered your website came from to tools such as Google Analytics. So why do you need to use them? Let's imagine someone clicks on a link on a different website to come to your website. Google Analytics most likely will automatically know where the user came from by looking at something called the referrer that is sent in the web request. In Google Analytics, you can then see the user entering the website through the referral source. But what if the link is not on the website, but in an email? Since the user could open the link in an external program like Outlook, there would be no referrer available to Google Analytics to read. In this case, Google Analytics will classify the user coming to your site directly. But wait, can't you tell Google Analytics to put it into a different bucket somehow? Yes, exactly. That's where UTM parameters come in. Since you can change the link in that email that you send out because you have control of it, simply add UTMs to your link and encode the information like the source directly into that link. Once the user clicks and then lands on your landing page, Google Analytics will read the UTM parameters from the URL and put the traffic into the right bucket. So in the future, if you want to exactly know where your traffic came from, then don't forget to use UTM parameters in links that point to your website. This has been UTM parameters in 100 seconds. If you enjoyed this and want to dive a little bit deeper into UTM parameters, then check out this video over there where I also give you access to a sheet that lets you generate your UTM parameters for your next campaign. Now my name is Julian till next time.