If you have ever shared an article from a social media site or opened a link from a friend, you might have noticed there are extra characters on the end of the URL, such as:

But what exactly are those characters and why are they attached to so many URLs?

The first half of the text in the example above is the actual URL of the page while the second half represents UTM parameters. Everything after the “?” does not change the page that you are visiting, but they provide details for marketers on where and how you might have accessed the webpage. 

Many winery marketers might be evaluating traffic within Google Analytics and seeing a large portion of their traffic come in through the Direct Channel without many details about how the user came to their website. UTM Parameters can help fill in some of the traffic acquisition details from users while providing additional information about the source and campaign they interacted with prior to visiting your website.

In this article we will talk about the importance of using UTM parameters with your winery website, best practices, and how UTM parameters can provide campaign analytics to help you calculate ROI. 

If you are running a Facebook ad, for example, you should want to know what happens after a user clicks on the ad. Did they buy wine? Make a reservation? Give up after 3 seconds and leave? You should also want to know where they are from? What kind of demographics do they represent? All of these questions can be better answered if you are using UTM parameters within your campaign links.  

Understanding the 5 Type of UTM Parameters 

Google has an incredibly helpful tool for automatically generating a URL with your UTM parameters called Campaign URL Builder. We bookmark it and use it multiple times a day. We suggest you do the same. 

Once you open the Campaign URL Builder page, you will see a form to fill out. Let’s break each item down:

Website URL: The actual URL of your website where you want to direct users to.

Source: This is generally the name of the website that is driving the traffic, such as “facebook”, “instagram”, “mailchimp”, and so on.

Medium: To ensure that you are accurately tracking traffic in Google Analytics, we recommend that this match one of the default channel groupings provided by Google. Your medium should always match one of the following:

• referral

• cpc (paid search)

• social

• email

• display

Campaign: This should simply be the name of your campaign and can be anything you’d like so long as it is descriptive enough for you to remember what the campaign was targeting. Some examples might be “july_4_sale”, “thanksgiving_awareness” or “new_years_special”.

Term: If you have different ads or initiatives within the same campaign, this could be a good place to differentiate those, such as “wine_bottles”, “summer_rose” or “holiday_chardonnay”.

Content: Within your separate ads, if you have variations or A/B tests, utilizing the content UTM tag is a great way to measure performances on those differences. 

Once you fill out the form, you will see a box titled “Share the generated campaign URL”. This outputs a new URL with all the UTM Parameters built in. This is the link you will want to share and use anytime you direct people to your website such as from a Facebook ad or email campaign.

Best Practices for UTM Parameters

Google is picky when it comes to defining UTM parameters. There are two rules we live by at our agency.

1. The first rule is to always use lower case lettering to ensure consistent tracking because Google Analytics is case sensitive and the same words with different case usage will appear as completely unique. For example, “TripAdvisor”, “Tripadvisor”, “tripadvisor” would be considered each a different source. 

2. The second rule is to use underscores in between words rather than spaces to make things cleaner. Within a URL, a space is represented as “%20” while an underscore is simply represented as “_”.  For example, “wine spectator” would be represented in the URL as “wine%20spectator” and that is just plain annoying. Instead, use an underscore between words so it displays cleaner. In this example you would add “wine_spectator” as the source and it would add “wine_speactor” to the URL instead of  “wine%20spectator”. 

How can we evaluate website performance with UTM parameters on a winery website?

You should use UTM parameters everytime you share a link that directs users to your website. For example, if you are using a UTM parameter within a Facebook campaign, you could create a segment within Google Analytics to view only the traffic from that specific campaign. This allows you to use all of the features of Analytics to closely evaluate performance on just that one parameter. 

When we speak with clients about digital advertising, some are skeptical and think there is no way to attribute ROI to these campaigns. In fact, properly using UTM parameters allows you to track ROI. When properly configured, you can filter your Google Analytics by UTM parameters such as source or medium and then track revenue down to the specific wine bottle and even wine club sign ups. Without UTM parameters, this would be much more difficult to calculate. 

When tracking a Facebook Ad we can create custom reports to match multiple dimensions and metrics that aren’t available in the default views of Google Analytics. Within our Facebook campaign example, this would allow us to see exact traffic for this Facebook Campaign by age, gender, household income, city, state, and device used among all of the other dimensions that are tracked within Google Analytics. Our agency uses this data to inform optimizations to our digital advertising for our winery clients. If we see similarities and correlations in the data of customers that convert based on our advertising, we can further optimize the ad to target people that fit a specific demographic and make sure that our client’s advertising dollars are being allocated in the best way possible. 

To learn more about UTM parameters and how to ensure that your winery’s advertising campaigns are optimized for ideal performance, reach out to us. We are always happy to chat.