UTM Tracking: Analysing Lead Generation Success

Everyone knows PPC success for a lead based company, is that the most obvious KPI measurement for PPC is, of course, driving lead volume.

However, as you scale your business and your marketing, analysing lead quality, lead to sale percentages and the quality of campaigns on the most important figure, return on investment must be utilised to properly calculate the performance of your paid advertising.

This is all done by handy short pieces of code, known as UTM parameters.

How does this work?

UTM parameters are short pieces of text code that you add to your URL to track further analytics from your advertising campaigns. These are usable with nearly all advertising platforms.

Utilising UTM parameters, you can pass information into your CRM to drive PPC metrics into your lead as well as the standard information your website collects.

The most common parameters consist of the ads campaign, ad group and keyword, this means that whatever keyword triggered your ad, then subsequently drove an lead, will be passed on to.

How do I set it up?

Speaking for Google ads specifically, they have greatly expanded the level for you to track with.

You can track at most levels of detail and there are very helpful google tools to build the parameters for you.

Once you have built the relevant parameters with the tool, defining your campaign, ad group and keyword for example, you can then have this information passed into your CRM.

Tip: If you use variables it will save you having to make hundreds of different codes, for example utm_term={keyword} will dynamically fill the keyword section every time, instead of manually creating parameters for every keyword in your account.

A quick tracking tag you can use that will be dynamic for your entire account can be seen below:

utm_source=google&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign={campaign}&utm_adgroup={adgroup}&utm_term={keyword}

The above code added to your ads account will then pull through that this lead was from Google, PPC, with your campaign name, ad group name and keyword triggered to drive that lead.

What is the benefit of using UTM parameters?

Profitability:

For SMEs and businesses just starting off with PPC, you will be able to evaluate not just the lead generation you are receiving, but the revenue you are generating of these sales, as they will all be tagged in your CRM. This is absolutely vital for new businesses as they can monitor not only their cost-per-lead, they can calculate their cost per sale and returns from paid marketing campaigns.

Data analysis:

You will now be able to track performance more granular and turn your lead generation into a revenue based model.

One scenario of this is as follows, Keyword A was driving 20 leads a month, at a cost of £50 a lead.

• Keyword B was driving 10 leads a month, at a cost of £80 a lead.
• At account level, the optimisations would be to reduce the bidding, decrease spend or even pause keyword B.
• However, what if now you have UTM tracking i tell you only 4 of Keyword A’s leads sold, but 6 from keyword B did?
• This would result in Keyword A having a cost per sale of £250, with keyword B having a cost per sale of £133. Suddenly the picture is entirely different.

UTM tracking allows you to follow an end to end process for lead generation accounts, whether that be analysing individual campaign performance, to each individual keyword, advertisers should no longer rely on ‘lead volume’ as this will allow you to optimise not just volume, but also aid in lead quality and increasing revenue generation.

Reporting:

One of the most important values of digital marketing is proving tangible results and justifying the budgets you require.

Utilising UTM tracking will allow you to do exactly this, you will be able to produce end-to-end data from ad spend to revenue generated, allowing for seamless and justifiable scaling.

Summary:

If you are struggling to measure the success of your paid marketing and are looking to scale your profits in a controlled way with the most available data, you must include UTM tracking in all your paid marketing campaigns.

If you would like to discuss further, and how to start accurately measuring the ROI of your lead generation marketing campaigns, get in touch with me at callum.leonard@embryodigital.co.uk.