Using UTMs to Improve Attribution Tracking

Learn why it’s important to use UTMs, a key step in getting marketing data well-structured for reporting on attribution. Two Octobers’ Paid Media Director Casey Anderson talks about what UTMs are, best practices for creating them, how to view the data you’re collecting in GA, and what decisions you can make with good UTM data.

What’s in this Video

1. UTMs are Essential for Attribution: UTMs are critical for marketing attribution, allowing marketers to correctly credit different touchpoints (traffic or conversions), which in turn enables better data analysis, database decisions, and marketing strategy refinement.
2. Know the Five Parameters: The five primary UTM parameters are Source, Medium, Campaign, Term, and Content.
3. Standardize Source and Medium: The utm_source (platform, e.g., Facebook, Google) and utm_medium (channel, e.g., paid social, CPC) parameters must be standardized and kept consistent over time to avoid messy data and ensure a clear, long-term story in your analytics.
4. Personalize Campaign, Term, and Content: The remaining three parameters (utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content) should be highly personalized or customized to capture specific data points like campaign names, offers, keywords, ad names, audience types, or creative elements.
5. Follow Formatting Best Practices: To maintain clean data, always use all lowercase letters and be aware that symbols can be read by analytics, potentially creating different line items.
6. Use Data to Tell a Story: The most important goal is to collect the right information to tell a successful story about what’s working, what to scale, and where to focus your marketing budget. When necessary, you can adjust customized parameters to better visualize or total up the data you need for this story.