Master Campaign Tracking in Statcounter with UTM Parameters

Tracking the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns is essential for establishing where to focus your effort and your budget for the best return. Get started tracking your campaigns in Statcounter with UTM parameters.

Statcounter automatically detects whether your visitors are coming from organic search, website referrals, social media, paid ads or direct traffic. The breakdown of each of these is available on the Traffic Sources report.

With the help of UTM parameters, Statcounter can give you an even more granular view of your traffic sources and show you key performance metrics at the individual campaign level.

What Are UTM Parameters?

UTM parameters are snippets of text added to the end of a URL that identify the individual campaign details that brought visitors to your site. They are typically used when you want to link back to your website from a marketing campaign such as an email newsletter, social media promotion or paid advertising campaign.

utm_source: Identifies the source of your traffic (e.g., google, facebook).
utm_medium: Describes the marketing medium (e.g., email, cpc, paid).
utm_campaign: Names the specific campaign (e.g., winter_sale).
utm_term: Used for paid search to track keywords.
utm_content: Differentiates similar content or links within the same ad (e.g., banner_ad, text_link).

How to Create UTM Parameters

Creating UTM parameters is straightforward. You can either manually add them to your URLs or use a Campaign URL Builder.

This is the landing page you want to direct traffic to for this campaign.utm-campaign-tracking E.g. https://www.example.com/landing-page.html

Append the UTM parameters to your URL using the following format:
?utm_source={source}&utm_medium={medium}&utm_campaign={campaign}

A URL with UTM parameters will look something like this:
https://www.example.com/landing-page.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=spring_sale

Tracking Your Campaigns in Statcounter

When you use UTM parameters on your campaign links, Statcounter can show you more detailed information about your campaigns.

The Traffic Sources report will list all of your campaigns and show you the number of sessions and the bounce rate for each. If you've set a conversion goal URL in Statcounter, you'll also see the conversion rate and number of conversions for each campaign.

You can drill down further on each campaign and see how they are performing over time with trend charts for number of daily sessions, bounce rate, conversion rate and goal conversions.

Best Practices for UTM Parameters

Develop a standardized naming convention for your UTM parameters. Use lowercase letters and underscores in place of spaces. Consistency will make your data easier to analyze and compare.

Before launching a campaign, test your UTM-enabled links to ensure they direct to the right page and track correctly in Statcounter.

Regularly check your campaigns in Statcounter to gauge their performance and see where you can adjust your digital marketing strategy as necessary.