How to Make "UTM Parameters" Work for You

In Google Analytics you can see that your marketing efforts are paying off in the form of website traffic, but how will you determine which of your marketing channels is generating the most traffic to your site? Which campaigns are leading to more sales? Do more consumers/customers click on an image or hyperlinked text? Google Analytics provides a way for you to get the granularity you are looking for from your website traffic through UTM parameters.
Your marketing team may be trying to manage all of your different campaigns internally using a spreadsheet. If you are running only a few campaigns, it can be managed through a shared spreadsheet. However, spreadsheets have a bad habit of being riddled with errors such as typos, misplaced values, or marketers use an outdated version of the spreadsheet. Essentially, what all this means is marketing teams are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for their marketing campaigns and the data they are receiving back from those campaigns is inaccurate.
Claravine’s Lead Customer Success Manager, Rebekah Garner writes “Managing tagged URL’s can become a mess if marketing teams don’t use a well-organized system. Claravine is a globally-managed app that requires your team to conform to the administrator’s standards. Claravine can eliminate the fragmented variables in reporting, for example, if one user says the UTM Campaign is “2018 Summer” and another “Summer 2018” and another “August 2018” but they are all the same campaign – your analysts will spend hours scrubbing the data for consistency. Claravine will align the accepted values for all users. Imagine – no more fragmented “email” vs “Email” vs “EMAIL” vs “E-mail”. All of these examples create fragmented instances in your analytics. If the administrator provides the acceptable values, all marketing users must conform and you will see consistent values in Google Analytics without hours of scrubbing.”
Garner, states that “UTM parameters allow marketers to track web source traffic. Clarity and consistency in UTM tracking parameters are paramount and Claravine is a marketer’s tool to gain the needed consistency in campaigns.” The question really becomes “where should I continue to spend my marketing dollars?” Getting the data is important, but getting the correct data is paramount. Using a UTM parameter governance layer to prepare your campaigns before launch will help ensure that the data you are receiving is accurate so you can become a marketing genius! That’s right, genius!
Claravine is a data governance platform that allows you not only to manage but to govern and unify the creation of tracking codes for your digital marketing campaigns. If you are looking for a solution that will help govern, unify, and manage your UTM parameters on a cloud-based platform, reach out to the experts at Claravine.