Guide to use UTM parameters in email marketing

Tracking your results and metrics is very important when it comes to email marketing. Without it, you’ll never be able to understand whether your marketing efforts are working in the right direction or not.

That's where UTM parameters are useful. They are an easy and free way to link your email campaigns to your website analytics. Let’s understand what UTMs are and how you can use them in your email campaigns.

What are UTM parameters

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, named after a web analytics company from the 2000s that Google acquired and rebranded to Google Analytics.

A UTM parameter is a short piece of text you add to the end of a URL. When someone clicks that link, the UTM data is sent to Google Analytics (or any other analytics tool installed on your site), showing exactly where that visitor came from.

Here's a simple example. A regular link looks like this:

https://yourwebsite.com/product

With UTM parameters, it looks like this:

https://yourwebsite.com/product?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=april_launch

The extra text after the “?” is the UTM data. It's invisible to your reader but very useful for you.

Importance of UTM in email marketing

Without UTMs, Google Analytics classifies most of your email traffic as “direct”. As a result, it's difficult to tell if someone visited your site through your newsletter. This makes it hard to track conversions and other important metrics needed to calculate the ROI of your efforts.

With UTM parameters, you can easily track exactly which campaign brought traffic to your site, which email links got the most clicks, and which newsletters are leading to most conversions or sign-ups. If you're using EmailOctopus for campaigns, UTMs connect your email stats with your website data. Your EmailOctopus dashboard already shows opens and clicks, but UTMs provide insight into what happens after someone clicks.

Additionally, most inboxes, like Apple Mail, now have new privacy features that tend to block email open and link click tracking, making default analytics less accurate. UTM in your links partially solve this by tracking email link clicks, which helps provide a better overview of traffic from your email campaigns.

Commonly used UTM parameters

There are three standard UTM parameters, but only two are commonly used.

1. utm_source: Source of traffic. For emails, this is often newsletter or emailoctopus.
2. utm_medium: Type of channel. For email marketing, this is always email.
3. utm_campaign: Name of your campaign. Use clear names like april_product_launch or weekly_digest_w14.

The two optional parameters are:

1. utm_content: Helpful if you have several links in one email. Label them to see which link gets the most clicks, such as header_cta or footer_link.
2. utm_term: Mostly for paid search, you can ignore this for newsletters.

For most newsletters, you'll just need utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign.

How to use UTM parameters in EmailOctopus

If UTMs are something that you’d like to use in your next email campaign, then there are two ways to set them up. Let’s go through both.

The easy way: automatic UTM tracking

EmailOctopus provides you with a built-in UTM tracking feature that allows you to add UTM parameters to your links automatically. You don't need to build any URLs yourself.

You can find full instructions in the EmailOctopus help article on tracking campaigns in Google Analytics. Once it's set up, every link in your campaigns gets tagged without any extra effort on your part.

Here are the UTMs that will be set once your “Google Analytics Link Tracking” feature is enabled in EmailOctopus:

• utm_source: emailoctopus
• utm_medium: email
• utm_campaign: the name of your campaign

While this process is easy, the limitation here is that your UTM parameters can’t be customised; however, you can overwrite them with custom values for the parameters. For example, if you want to use a 'utm_campaign' value of 'YourCustomValue' on one of your links, then you can simply modify the link so it looks like this: https://example.com/?utm_campaign=YourCustomValue.

The custom way: build your own UTM URLs

If you want more control over how your links/UTMs are labelled, or if you're using a different analytics tool, you can build your own UTM URLs and drop them directly into your email design.

The easiest way to build a UTM URL is with Google's free Campaign URL Builder. Fill in the fields, copy the generated URL, and paste it into the link field inside the EmailOctopus drag-and-drop editor.

This approach lets you customise every parameter, which is handy when you're running multiple campaigns at once and want granular tracking.

For example, if you're sending a product launch email and a weekly digest in the same week, you could use:

• utm_campaign=product_launch_april
• utm_campaign=weekly_digest_w16

Things to keep in mind

UTMs are easy to use, but small mistakes can quickly make your data confusing. Here's what to keep in mind:

1. Be consistent: UTM parameters are case-sensitive. For example, utm_source=Newsletter and utm_source=newsletter will be tracked as two different sources in Google Analytics. Choose one format and stick with it. Using lowercase is the safest option.
2. Avoid spaces: Spaces in UTM values turn into %20 in URLs, which looks messy and can cause tracking problems. Use underscores (_) or hyphens (-) instead, so “april launch” should be “april_launch”.
3. Keep campaign names the same over time: If you call it weekly_digest one month and weekly_newsletter the next, it will be difficult to compare results over time. Set a naming rule early on and make sure your team knows it.
4. Test your links first: Always click your UTM links before sharing to ensure they work properly and go to the correct page. A broken or incorrect URL wastes a valuable click.

Conclusion

UTM parameters are an easy and useful tool for email marketers. Whether you use our automated UTM feature or create your own URLs, it's important to be consistent.

If you need a simple email marketing tool that lets you easily track link clicks with UTMs, EmailOctopus is a great choice. It's free for up to 2,000 subscribers and 10,000 monthly email sends - try now.