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Do you know which marketing campaigns are bringing the most traffic to your website? Or which ads are driving the most conversions and revenue? As a marketer, having the right kind of campaign tracking in place is critical. Without it, it’s hard to tell which efforts you should double down on and which may be draining your budget.
As a senior marketing technology manager at DIRECTV, I’m constantly thinking about what new tools we can implement to take campaign tracking to the next level. I’ve recently had the opportunity to reevaluate our legacy processes and institute some new strategies. One of the changes I’m most excited about is transitioning from our legacy source code tracking system to UTM tracking.
In this post, I’ll go over the basics of what UTM tracking is, what its benefits are, and how we’re combining it with Invoca call tracking to drive better results.
Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters are variants of URL parameters used to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media. Simply put, a UTM parameter is a code that you can add to the end of a URL to track and analyze website traffic sources. The UTM parameters are tags that help Google Analytics or other web analytics software track the journey of the visitor who clicked the link. UTM parameters are composed of several elements, such as: source, medium, campaign, term, and content. The parameters allow you to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and gain insights into which channels are driving traffic, clicks, and conversions.
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s dive into some of the benefits that marketing teams receive when they use UTM tracking.
One of the most obvious benefits of UTM tracking is that its intuitive. As I mentioned above, UTM strings are made up of several elements, including: source, medium, campaign, term, and content. Here is a quick breakdown of what those different elements mean:
Here’s what the example above looks like as a UTM string:
?utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=sports&utm_content=baseball
With these distinct elements, a marketer can look at the UTM and understand exactly the journey the user took to arrive at the page.
This is a stark contrast from our old source code tracking, which was a string of 17 characters. In that system, the characters “AE58586679821233L” would be appended to the end of a URL to signify the customer journey example above. This, as you can see, is far less intuitive and needs to be decoded before anyone can figure out what it means.
In the past, when we used source code tracking, other marketing team members had to constantly ask me what each 17-character source code variation meant before they could build reports. This was a persistent issue that took up a good deal of time and energy.
Now, with UTM tracking, my teammates can easily see what the parameters mean, and they no longer need me to decode anything for them. This empowers them to quickly pull the data they need. They can also build reports based on each of element in the UTM reporting — for example, they can easily create side-by-side comparisons of the different types of “content.”
A problem that marketing teams often run into is that they don’t have the granular attribution they need to get the most out of their marketing budgets. If you don’t know exactly which channels, campaigns, and ad creatives are contributing to revenue, it’s difficult to know where to put your precious marketing dollars.
The advantage of UTM tracking is that it is extremely granular. With our new UTMs, we can nail down not only which campaigns, but also which pieces of ad creative are driving sales and leads. This allows us to double down on our highest performing programs to stretch our budget further. We can also identify ad creative variations that may be underperforming, and cut spending on them to conserve our budget.
According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers say they expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. If you want to live up to the expectations of today’s customers, personalization is a must.
UTM parameters have been instrumental in helping us meet our customers’ personalization expectations. By feeding UTM strings into our on-page personalization tools, we can deliver customized experiences that meet each customer’s needs and preferences. For example, if a consumer enters our site from a sports package campaign that is local to Houston, our on-page personalization tools can capture that information from the UTM. The tool can then display content that’s reflective of the Houston campaign on the page — for example, the copy would tout that the sports package includes Houston Rockets and the Astros games, and the imagery would feature the teams’ logos.
This creates a more seamless experience for our audience, and it leads to more conversions by showing them the content they care about.
UTMs provide valuable attribution data for online interactions, but that’s only one piece of the customer journey. The buy flow on the DIRECTV website only makes up a portion of our overall sales, since many of our customers call us as part of their journey. These phone calls are an opportunity for them to get additional information, resolve lingering questions, and make a genuine human connection with our brand. That’s why we use Invoca call tracking to get complete call attribution.
Invoca captures our UTMs and pairs them with its call tracking data. This allows us to see the full journey the customer took leading up to the call, as well what happened on the call. For example, we can see that a caller entered our site from a Facebook campaign and when they picked up the phone, they purchased a sports package. Before we had Invoca, we wouldn’t have known this over-the-phone purchase occurred. Therefore, we may have underreported the conversions the Facebook campaign drove, and allocated our budget incorrectly as a result.
In addition to improving attribution, Invoca enhances our personalization efforts. With our UTMs, we can personalize elements of the webpage to align with the visitor’s needs and preferences. Invoca allows us to take that a step further and personalize the call experience as well. For example, if the UTM indicates that the consumer called from a “Premier Package” campaign, Invoca can automatically route the call to an agent who specializes in selling that package. In addition, Invoca’s PreSense feature can feed the agent the caller’s information before the call, so that they can greet them like a VIP and dive into the package specifics right away.
Read the full DIRECTV case study here
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