UTM Code Generator

How To Use

Campaign Source: Identifies a search engine, newsletter name, or other source.

Example: "google"

Campaign Medium: Identifies a medium such as email or cost-per-click.

Example: "cpc"

Campaign Name: Used for keyword analysis. Use to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign.

Example: "spring sale"

Campaign Term: Used for paid search. Use to note the keywords for this ad.

Example: "running+shoes"

Campaign Content: Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.

Example: "logolink" or "textlink"

What Is A UTM Code?

Ever been checking social media, click on a link to another website, then notice some crazy looking strings in your url bar?

All those parameters that come after the ? make up the UTM code. Short for Urchin Tracking Module code, UTM Codes are a simple snippet of text added to the end of a URL that help track the performance of marketing campaigns.

It consists of parameters like:

• utm_source
• utm_medium
• utm_campaign
• utm_content
• utm_term

What's The Point Of UTM Codes?

If you're not familiar with digital marketing or are just getting started, let me tell you that these UTM codes are absolutely ESSENTIAL to marketing success.

When you use a tool like Google Analytics to measure your website traffic and conversions, you can see your metrics segmented by channel such as Direct, CPC, Referral, and many more. This information is available in GA4 because of UTM codes. They contain all of the essential context of each click so that marketers can measure the success of their campaigns in granular detail.

So let's say you are a local furniture retailer with an online store and you want to advertise a couch sale that you're having using an email to your previous customers. If your ad just tells people to go to: “example.com/couch-sale”, when you monitor your website traffic you will see lots of new traffic coming to that page, but you won't know for sure if your ad is the reason.

This problem can be easily solved with UTM codes. By adding some parameters you can package valuable information within the link that can be picked up by tools like Google Analytics.

For example:

“example.com/couch-sale?utm_source=customer_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=couch-sale”

Without adding these parameters, Google Analytics would not be able to attribute the traffic correctly and you would see everything attributed to “direct” in the interface.

How Do UTM Codes Work?

UTM Codes work through the use of parameters in the url. They can be added to urls manually (like in the above example), but many PPC platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads will use auto tagging to automatically add these parameters to outbound links from their respective platforms.

If you need to add UTM codes to your urls manually you can generate them using our UTM code builder and then share them across the internet and beyond 😎.

How To Create A UTM Code?

You can generate UTM codes using our tool above, but you could also do it in a notepad file - there's really nothing tricky about it. Just make sure you have the 3 required parameters:

• utm_source
• utm_medium
• utm_campaign

Once you create the url it's up to you how you use it. Obviously test it to make sure that there's no unexpected behavior when users visit the site. If there's no issues, then either share it with potential customers directly or add it as the final/target url in your PPC platform.

How To Add A UTM Code To A URL

Take the example url used above:

“example.com/couch-sale?utm_source=customer_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=couch-sale”

The UTM code portion of the url is everything that comes after the ?, so if your page url is “example.com/couch-sale”, you would just add a question mark, then start listing each required parameter. The parameter name must be followed by an equals sign, then the value of the parameter. Each parameter must be separated by an ampersand symbol. (It's important to note that if you use a special character in the value of your parameter that would need to be escaped. Our tool will do this automatically).

You could do all that, or you could just use our UTM code generator which will give you the complete final url.

How To Create A UTM Code In Google Analytics?

Simple answer, you don't. UTM codes are just parameters added after the page url so you wouldn't be creating them through Google Analytics. To create a UTM code, all you have to do is take a page on your website that already exists and add the UTM parameters to the URL.

How To Find UTM Codes In Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is one of the best places to get insight into who is visiting your website and where that traffic is originating from. My favorite places to see this information are in the User Acquisition Report and the Traffic Acquisition Report. Both reports should be located under the Acquisition tab of the Reports page.

Here you can see the default channel group but you can also click the blue + in the first column of the report table and add the UTM code dimensions to see what specific codes are being used:

If you need to see more than just one UTM code value at a time, I recommend using the explorations tab where you can fully customize the report with as many columns as you want.