Are you driving traffic to one of your landing pages from multiple sources? Paying for Google ads, LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, and doing a little social media outreach all at the same time?

This knowledge base article was written by an Unbounce customer (#HighFive!) - Stephan Wiedner is the co-founder of Noomii.com, the directory of professional business coaches.

If you start getting conversions on your landing pages, you may not know which source of traffic is providing the best results. You could create different landing pages for each source of traffic but you may want to test one variable at a time. In this case you’d be testing the source of the traffic (i.e. LinkedIn ads versus Google ads).

Don’t get me wrong, there are potential benefits to tailoring landing pages to each of your traffic sources but why not test one thing at a time?

Google Analytics gives you the ability to track all of your landing page results in one place. All you have to do is:

1. Create trackable URLs for each ad and for each source
2. Paste the trackable URLs into your ads
3. Make sure you have Google Analytics working on all of your landing pages

So let’s get starting by understanding what trackable (a.k.a. UTM) URLs are.

Understanding UTM parameters

For information on capturing UTM parameters with your form submissions in Unbounce see How to Prepopulate a Form with URL Parameters

UTM (urchin tracking module) parameters are tags you can add to a URL in your ad copy so you can know where your traffic is coming from. By default, Google uses UTM tracking in Adwords and you don’t have to do anything. They are built in to help you keep track of the following parameters:

Campaign Source - The referrer: google, linkedin, stumbleupon
Campaign Medium - Marketing medium: cpc, email, social media
Compaign Name - The product: camping gear, men’s clothing
Campaign Content - The ad group: tents, cooking equipment
Campaign Term - The paid keyword

First I’ll explain how Google Adwords is structured and uses UTMs so you can then start using them on other ad networks. I learnt the hard way by using a variety of UTMs and then the data became impossible to understand in GAnalytics.

Google AdWords is structured like this:

Campaign 1
- Ad Group 1
- Ad Group 2
- Ad Group 3

Campaign 2
- Ad Group 4
- Ad Group 5
- Ad Group 6

Let’s say you are a sporting goods store and you offer a vast range of products in a number of different areas: Camping, Men’s Clothing, Fishing, etc... Your campaigns might look like this:

Camping Gear
- Tents
- Cooking Equipments
- Dehydrated Foods

Men’s Clothing
- Men’s Athletic Pants
- Men’s Underwear
- Men’s Quick-Dry Shirts

With the Adwords structure given above, an ad for tents would contain the following UTM information:

Campaign Source (utm_source) - google
Campaign Medium (utm_medium) - cpc
Compaign Name (utm_campaign) - Camping Gear
Campaign Content (utm_content) - Tents
Campaign Term (utm_term) - The paid keyword: let’s say it was “four man tents”

Therefore, the URL of your landing page would be something like this:

bills-sporting-goods.com/four-man-tents?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=camping%2Bgear&utm_content=tents&utm_term=four%2Bman%2Btents

UTMs for Other Ad Networks

When you create ads in other ad networks, you’ll have to manually add the UTM parameters to your landing page URLs. For example, imagine extending the Camping Gear campaign from above to Facebook. The UTM parameters would be like this:

Campaign Source (utm_source) - google facebook
Campaign Medium (utm_medium) - cpc (stays the same)
Compaign Name (utm_campaign) - Camping Gear (stays the same)
Campaign Content (utm_content) - Tents (stays the same)
Campaign Term (utm_term) - ???

What to choose for the campaign term? Most other ad networks are not keyword focused like Google AdWords. In Facebook, you choose your audience based on demographic criteria. Therefore, use the campaign term to briefly describe who is seeing the a

d. In this case, you may opt for “single males under 35” or “married college grads”.

The resulting URL that you paste to your Facebook ad would look like this:

bills-sporting-goods.com/four-man-tents?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=camping%2Bgear&utm_content=tents&utm_term=single%2Bmales%2Bunder%2B35

Generate UTM URLs with Ease

Now that you understand how UTMs are structured, it helps to have a tool to create the URLs for you. Google has a handy URL Builder for one-offs.

I have been using this handy UTM URL generator spreadsheet created by EpikOne, Inc. that can be used to store as many URLs as you want. I prefer this solution so I can see all my URLs in one place.

Viewing the Source of Your Landing Page Traffic in Google Analytics

Provided you have added Google Analytics code to your landing pages and are tracking external conversions, you can view the source of your landing page in Google Analytics. I’ve created a custom report in Google Analytics 5 that shows me total visitors and conversion rates broken down by campaign source and medium.

As a bonus, if you have gone through the trouble of making sure all of your ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other ad networks contain UTM tracking, you might as well pass the UTM parameters through to your landing page forms using hidden fields. That way, you can also see the source of your conversions in Unbounce.

This knowledge base article was written by an Unbounce customer - Stephan Wiedner is the co-founder of Noomii.com, the directory of professional business coaches.