What are UTM parameters?

Digital marketing comes with the perks of tracking performance, ROI analytics and attributing success which is a true added benefit when compared with traditional advertising.

With display advertising, just as well as with companion banners in audio advertising, traffic is usually acquired through link clicks, meaning that the source of that traffic can be easily monitored with a proper tracking schematic in place. 

UTM parameters, as defined by Wikipedia, are a set of URL parameters used to measure the performance and effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. These parameters are generally accepted out-of-the-box by tracking tools such as Google Analytics.

List of available UTM parameters

There is a list of five available UTM parameters that should be more than sufficient for attributing campaign traffic:

• utm_source – used to identify the originator of your traffic (ex: audiogo)
• utm_medium – used to identify the environment the ad was delivered to (ex: digital-radio)
• utm_campaign – used to identify the campaign or promotion used by the advertiser (ex: spring-sale)
• utm_term – generally used to identify search terms; this is an optional parameter that can be otherwise used to further segment the audience
• utm_content – used to identify which ad was clicked (ex: companion-banner)

Example of UTM parameters usage

UTM parameters are following the GET URL structure, where a string containing a set of key-value pairs are appended to a base URL, for example:

https://www.audiogo.com?utm_source=audiogo&utm_medium=music-streaming&utm_campaign=radio-ad&utm_term=audio-advertising&utm_content=companion-banner 

Building a UTM tracking link

UTM tracking links can be edited by hand as outlined above.

For simplicity, advertisers can use this free tracking URL builder offered by AudioGO.