Pawel Szulencki Search Engine Optimization/Marketing blog.
Google Analytics UTM tags
27Oct2008 Filed under: Google Analytics Author: Pawel Szulencki
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Google Analytics gives you opportunity to tag your url’s so you can track your campaigns even more efficiently. The seoblogr.com/google-analytics/google-analytics-utm-tags/">UTM tags (im still not sure if it comes from Urchin Traffic Monitor or Urchin Tracking Module) lets you add additional information to the link so you can track how is your campaign is performing.
For example you may add the following information to your link:
http://www.example.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_ter m=October%2B2008&utm_campaign=promotion
where utm_source - the source of the visitor (google, newsletter, certain website etc.),
utm_medium - the medium source (banner, email, ppc campaign),
utm_term - if its a paid keyword you can add the keyword here (if you buy a link from other website you can add the keyword you target on this website),
utm_campaign - campaign name (promotional, special discount, promo code etc.),
Now, that would be a hard thing to do if someone asked you to rewrite hundred of URL’s manually. Luckily there is a URL link builder tool that lets you easily create URL’s with all those information.
Why is it important to use Google Analytics UTM tagging?
It helps you track your online campaigns in an easier way. By using the UTM tracking tags Google Analytics creates a separate URL statistics for those tagged URL’s. Note that each URL with unique UTM tags is treated as separate URl in Google Analytics software and thats why its much faster and easier to see that a user came from certain campaign.
Sphere: Related Content- Tags: Google, Google Analytics, tag, utm
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About this blog
Pawel Szulencki is a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Marketing certified specialist who is interested in organic SEO, paid campaigns (PPC) and Social Media Marketing channels. (Read more)
Sebastiaan (1 comments.)
December 17th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Do you know how the UTM tags influence SEO? Let’s say I want to set up some links from site X to my page at http://www.blablabla.com/index.html for SEO purposes. But I also want to track traffic and possible conversions from these links at site X.
To accomplish this I would add the UTM tags to these links. Site X would then link to my site with the following link: http://www.blablabla.com/index.html?utm_campaign=siteX
My question is: do these links with utm tags still count as inbound links to http://www.blablabla.com/index.html or does google see http://www.blablabla.com/index.html?utm_campaign=siteX as a separate page and did I just kill the SEO effect for my index.html?
Pawel Szulencki (171 comments.)
December 17th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
@Sebastiaan: Thats an excellent question. When it comes to Google, they recognize their own tags and know their purpose. They treat them as extra information about link to http://www.blablabla.com/index.html Therefore any link with UTM tags will pass whole SEO benefits to that link (http://www.blablabla.com/index.html), UTM tags just give more details about that link.
But when it comes to other search engines, they may not recognize those tags and pass value to http://www.blablabla.com/index.html?utm_campaign=siteX in your case. Yahoo! now enables “remove parameters” option, so you can remove those tags from any URl you want and therefore Yahoo! will count those tagged links the same as untagged links. That way all links pointing to some web page will be counted the same. I am not sure about how MSN deals with that.
The mains points are:
Dont worry about Google, they invented those tags and they can handle them well.
Configure your Yahoo! account to eliminate the unnecessary tags.
Test with other search engines and if you see some results let us know
Good luck.
Breezy
January 28th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Hi, I am also curious about using UTM parameters. I am also passing other parameters in the URL. I am assuming that Google will not handle those as well as UTM tags and my page rank will drop, right?
Pawel Szulencki (171 comments.)
January 30th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
@Breezy: Google will only take into consideration those parameters that are UTM tags, which comply with UTM tags specification. Otherwise those are just normal parameters.
Marian
May 20th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
@Pawel Szulencki:
Thanks Pawel for nice post. But…. I doubt that the google recognize their own utm parameters. Type in google ” inurl:utm_source= site:.com ” so you can find out, that there are meny url with utm parameters, already indexed. It seems url’s are treated as doubles. Am I wrong?
Isn’t it better to use “#” instead of “?” in url?
Example:
/index.html#utm_campaign=siteX
+
add to tracking code
pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);
Am I going to loose any seo benefits ?
Pawel Szulencki (171 comments.)
May 20th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
@Marian: You are absolutely right Marian. I was not aware of such problem with Google UTM tags and i have to apologize for wrong advice above. For some strange reason Google does not recognize its own tags and treats them as separate URL addresses. That is absolutely strange behavior as far as im concerned. It gives different PageRank values to pages with utl tags and without them. Thats really weird that Google cant handle their own tags.
Anyway, the solution you have described is correct and should be implemented if you have or think that you will have problems with duplicate content issue caused by utm tags.
Brian (1 comments.)
May 24th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Hi Pawel,
Nice post and almost what I need. I am running several hundred ads. I would like to pass all of the Google campaign information as parameters on the URL link to my site so that I can parse and collect them at my site in a database app. If I use autotagging, I get an unusable string. But manually tagging each of them will take a long time, be error prone and a maintenance headache. Unless it is possible to use some Google variable that inserts the campaign info automatically.
Do you know if that’s possible?
Pawel Szulencki (171 comments.)
May 26th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
@Brian: Im sorry but i dont know any other way.
Jeff(new comment)
August 25th, 2009 at 12:50 am
Where does the UTM information actually appear in analytics?
Hasit(new comment)
January 4th, 2010 at 10:28 am
Anyone has found the solution of the above problem?