What is UTM Source tracking and why is it extremely important for your marketing activities? Well, tracking the source of your traffic, leads or sales, is vital and essential should you wish to elevate your marketing and remarketing to the next level.
Without tracking the source of your audience you will never be able to find out what works best and what doesn’t.
For example, let’s assume that you have published some posts on Social Media but you don’t know which posts brought in most of the conversions, e.g. contact form submissions. Why are you then publishing posts in the first place? Why wasting your time simply like that?
Yes, you do want to have online presence on Social Media, but you have to be able also to measure the effectiveness and the performance of your posts.
Furthermore, the majority of the marketers apply UTM Source tracking on paid campaigns only as they wish to understand the risk versus reward ratio. But should a marketer perform tracking only on paid campaigns? Well in our opinion the answer is no.
You should always track your source in whatever you do, as at the end of the day “time is money”. Time is a hidden cost which nobody comprehends, but it is the biggest expenditure versus performance.
Therefore, in this article you are going to see how we can perform source tracking using a great plugin, the HandL UTM Grabber, along with Contact Form 7 for WordPress, the Campaign URL Builder, and a URL Shortener tool called Shortenlinkurl. Note that you can use any other shortener tool.
Let’s take one step at a time.
The HandL UTM Grabber plugin is a tool that you can use for tracking the UTM source along with other UTM parameters that matters to you the most.
Further on, with the Campaign URL Builder we indicate the purpose of a campaign or post that we wish the HandL UTM Grabber to “grab” on and pass the source and other UTM parameters’ information successfully.
The URL Shortener tool will be used to shorten the huge tracking link that will be generated from the Campaign URL Builder.
The Contact Form 7 is a well reputable form that once filled by a user, this user (lead) is presumed to be a potential client.
We therefore need to know in this case, where from this user or users came from. Did they come from a paid campaign or a published post from Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere? The UTM Source and other UTM parameters give us the answers.
The first step is to add the “Contact Form 7” Plugin if you don’t already have it installed on your WordPress site. You also have to install the HandL UTM Grabber Plugin.
Upon installing the “Contact Form 7” you have to create a form.
The second step is to use a set of parameters or shortcodes that will integrate or interconnect the Contact Form 7 with the HandL UTM Grabber Plugin. The parameters are the ones below.
The below shortcodes should be added into the “Form” section of your Contact Form 7. Kindly see the image presented below these shortcodes for a better understanding.
The next and third step, as a part of adding the shortcodes to contact form, is to add another set of shortcodes into the “Mail” section of your contact form.
Kindly see the shortcodes below, as well as how to add them correctly to the Mail section as per the image presented below these shortcodes:
Campaign Name:
Campaign Source:
Campaign Medium:
Campaign Term:
Campaign Content:
Gclid:
Kindly note that in each of the two cases when adding shortcodes, you have to “Save” your changes.
Now you almost half way through.
The fifth step is to use the Campaign URL Builder and create a tracking URL.
In this example, we are going to implement a tracking link on a Twitter post for one of our existing articles on our website’s blog. We will then click the tracking link of this Twitter post and be redirected to the specific article, and thereafter fill in our contact form to see how the UTM source and other parameters will be recorded.
Assuming that, for the purpose of tracking we wish to track how many contact form submissions we had from this article https://marketersground.com/how-to-increase-website-traffic-from-social-media/ that we have already published as a Twitter post. How can we do that?
We therefore have to add all the necessary details of this article in the Campaign URL Builder, as per the image below, so that we can then use the tracking link generated to our Twitter post.
After adding all the necessary parameters, a long tracking link is generated. In order though, to have a clear and short link that will not scare our readers, we have to make it shorter. We can use the Shortenlinkurl tool to do that.
As a part of the sixth step, we will therefore copy the above link and proceed with making it shorter.
After pasting the long “ugly” link, we click the “Shorten” button and a shorter link is generated. We then click the “Copy” button to copy the shorter link and wait. Kindly note that you have to register to be able to shorten an unlimited number of links, as well as with the paid plans you can brand your shortened link as per your website’s domain.
The seventh step, is to add the shortened link in the description of your Twitter post so that once the users view the post and wish to know more they can click on this link and be redirected to the specific article.
As you can see below, in the Twitter post we have added the shortened link in the description.
Let’s assume that one of your readers really wants to read more. He or she will therefore click the shortened link of the description to read the whole article.
Now, in the condition that he or she got really excited with the article and wants to contact us to learn more about us and / or to receive our services, he or she then fills in the contact form of this page: https://marketersground.com/contact-us/.
Upon successful submission, all his or her details, including the source and other UTM parameters, will be captured on our email as per the image below.
You can now see the importance of tracking and why everything should be set up the right way.
Knowing where your leads or contacts are coming from gives you an additional understanding of what works the most e.g. which posts work best, which channel, which channel ads and other key marketing data.
For support or guidance you can always communicate with us.