How to use campaign URLs to monitor traffic to the website

This guidance is for Campaigns Officers who want to monitor traffic to website content from different sources.

A UTM or 'Urchin Tracking Module' is a snippet of text added to the end of a webpage URL to track the performance of a certain campaign.

The UTM will include the following tags:

• source - the referrer such as 'facebook' or 'newsletter'
• medium - how the traffic gets to you, for example 'social' or 'print'
• campaign ID - this should be used across all UTMs related to the same campaign to keep them grouped together within the analytics platform

These UTM links are then used in the source and medium that they were set up for, for example printed in a newsletter. Every time that URL is visited, the visits will show up in your analytics platform so you can see how many visitors were driven to the page from that source.

I want to measure traffic to the Access All Areas campaign page from a:

• printed newsletter (via a QR code)
• paid facebook ad
• social media post on our instagram account

I used a campaign URL builder (from Google or Siteimprove) and added the UTM source and medium tag to the URL as well as the campaign ID: access-all-areas-2024.

The UTM created for use in the newsletter is:

I'd repeat this with all the sources and mediums using the same campaign ID and the following sources and mediums:

• facebook/paid
• instagram/social

The visits from each UTM will be shown in the analytics platform allowing you to see how effective each source has been at promoting your campaign.

You should create and use UTM links when you want to measure traffic to a page on buckinghamshire.gov.uk from:

• print media (newsletters, leaflets, letters)
• digital media (digital signage, bus screens, information kiosks)
• social media (although this can also be done by using bit.ly or Orlo)
• emails or documents

You don't need to use UTMs to track visits to a page on buckinghamshire.gov.uk from:

• another page on buckinghamshire.gov.uk (including the promo box on the homepage if there are no other links to the content from the homepage)
• external search (google, yahoo, bing)
• other referring websites linking to it (parish or town council websites, NHS website or GOV.UK)

We can access this data using our analytics platform without the need for UTMs.

When generating UTMs, avoid:

• using uppercase letters - stick to using lowercase letters instead, this is because using ‘Instagram’ and ‘instagram’ will produce 2 separate groups of analytics
• using symbols like '?' and '&' - these can break your UTM links
• inconsistency - the whole team sticking to using the same words in UTMs is important to make sure that data across campaigns can be easily grouped or compared for example using 'social' instead of 'socials'

You will need to ensure that you only use the UTM in the exact source and medium that it was set up for and nowhere else. Otherwise none of your data will be accurate.

You may want to have a shorter URL for use on:

• printed media (letters, leaflets, magazines)
• digital screens
• the radio (to be read out)

Contact the Web Team via servicenow to request short URLs for your UTMs. They will need to meet our short URL guidelines.

You do not need short URLs for:

• social media posts, digital ads or emails (the UTM should be embedded in link text instead)
• QR codes (the full UTM should be put into the QR code)

Contact the Web Team via servicenow for support with:

• generating and managing UTM links
• getting or interpreting analytics