UTM tagging convention

Once you launch your crowdfunding campaign you will have access to your Campaign Analytics page, which provides insight on different aspects of performance data. This includes information about how many people have visited your page, their demographic breakdown, and also what they do once they’re on the page (how much time they spend on it, how many of them perform valuable actions like clicking the “invest” button, etc).

Most of the people coming to your page will have done so by clicking a link placed somewhere - an ad, some content on social media, an email, etc. It is important to tag these links with a unique identifier that allows you to separate them from each other, so you can analyze their effectiveness separately. To do this you’ll need to use UTM tags.

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What are UTM Tags?

UTM tags are bits of text you can add to the end of a link to help provide information for categorizing and better understanding the traffic you drive to your campaign page.

They do not change the page in any way, and the user is completely unaffected. But they allow information to be gathered and stored in Google Analytics (which will then be visible on your Campaign Analytics page).

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As an example, let’s look at FrontFundr’s homepage link, both with and without a UTM code added:

• Without a UTMsome text
  • https://www.frontfundr.com/
• With a UTMsome text
  • https://www.frontfundr.com/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=campaign_launch

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The section in bold font is the UTM code. It allows us to see where the traffic came from, and to group all similar traffic together.

You can add these manually, although it’s quicker and easier to build them using a tool. Google has a good free one that also allows you to shorten the links so they look more appealing.

You can learn more about UTM tags in this excellent guide by Buffer.

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What can UTM tags tell you?

UTM tags allow you to better understand not only where the traffic to your campaign page comes from, but also how each individual source of traffic performed (be it traffic from your newsletter, traffic from social media, a banner on your website, paid ads, sponsored posts, etc).

This is crucial knowledge and insight to have, as it allows you to gauge the quality of each traffic source too (one source may provide a lot of traffic but convert badly, whereas another one may provide low volume but convert really well).

Armed with this knowledge you can focus on the sources of traffic that drive the most value and investments! Here’s an example of what that data looks like on your Campaign Analytics page, in this case a breakdown of where investments in your campaign (people who have initiated the payment process) come from.

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A cheat sheet on how to use UTM tags

There are three sections to most UTM tags, the source, the medium, and the campaign.

Here’s what to add for each of those sections (and remember you can do this automagically with the free Google tool we mentioned above):

• The “source” UTM tag means the referrer, in other words where the traffic came
• from (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.)
• The “medium” UTM tag means how the traffic gets to you (for most social media
• links, this will just be “social”)
• The “campaign” UTM tag = why the traffic is coming to you (your campaign launch, a
• specific piece of content, a campaign update, etc.).some text
  • Note that it is not currently possible to segment your traffic by campaign on your Campaign Analytics page, only by source and medium.

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You can get very granular with UTM tags, but for ease we suggest starting with the following, which should cover your main campaign marketing activities!

* This covers all emails sent out by FrontFundr, such as the weekly newsletter. This UTM is already defined, so you won’t be able to edit it.

**As Google Analytics and Google Ads are both Google platforms they already sync well with each other. And, if you prefer, you can also set up auto-tagging for your Google Ads (you’ll need your own Google Analytics account for this though, not the one linked to your Campaign Analytics page).

*** Ideally you should also track these campaigns through Facebook’s Ads Manager, to understand which of your ads are working the best (and you should also add in a campaign UTM for these paid ads for greater granularity).