What Are UTM Parameters? Enhancing Website Forms with UTM
Are you wondering how to add UTM parameters to leads in your CRM? Perhaps you'd like to understand where your best quality leads and conversions come from?
If so, this guide is for you! We'll walk through how to automatically add UTM parameters to leads you capture from your website so that you can optimise your campaigns for conversions rather than just leads.
What are UTM parameters and how do they work with lead generation?
UTM parameters are known to most as tags added to URLs - variables added to the end of existing URLs.
When someone clicks the URL, the tags are sent to your Google Analytics for tracking, where they can be analyzed in a number of different ways to glean different types of information about who clicked your link.
There are 5 different parameters you can track (the first 3 are required by Google):
- Campaign source — this tells us where the traffic came from specifically. Which social media post, blog article, ad, or email exactly did the lead find the link inside?
- Campaign medium — this is a broader category showing the type of source. Was it a social media page, an email, paid social, or something else?
- Campaign name — this is the name you gave your campaign in Google Analytics. It’s an easy (and required) way to differentiate campaigns from each other and organize your analyses.
- Campaign term — this allows you to track specific keywords or phrases in your content
- Campaign content — you can track specific ads within a campaign
However, in reality UTM parameters are just a nice way of classifying marketing sources. By adding them to any lead or action, you can quickly identify where leads and actions originated.
How to attach UTM parameters to leads from your website forms
Your leads are more than just potential customers. They can also provide incredibly useful insights about your overall marketing strategy. Understanding your leads and where they’re coming from can help you build a much more effective overall marketing process and grow your business more efficiently by focusing on the traffic sources that work.
It's easy to see where lead form submissions are coming from in Google Analytics using UTM tracking and website conversions. However, unless you send these UTM parameters with each lead to your CRM, you won't know where your opportunities or conversions are coming from.
By sending UTM parameters with your leads to your CRM, you can track the sources, campaigns, ads and keywords that drive actual results rather than just leads!
In Driftrock, our lead generation forms have a feature allowing you to capture Google Analytics UTM parameters with every lead. This helps you gain deeper insights into your audience and traffic and make better decisions.
Why is it so important to capture UTM parameters?
Capturing UTM parameters gives you a number of powerful advantages when it comes to understanding your marketing activities and your leads:
- Gain valuable insights into your audience. You can learn a lot about your leads and customers from UTM parameters. Find out how your audience members behave and what works most effectively so you can allocate your resources and budget in the most effective way.
- Understand how effective your campaigns are. UTM parameters help you understand how well your social media and ad campaigns are working. They’ll quickly shine a light on which efforts are resulting in lots of traffic and which ones are falling flat, allowing you to make necessary changes and optimize your processes.
- Learn more about conversion and traffic sources. You can quickly see where your traffic is coming from and which ads are converting well. This helps you understand your audience as a whole and find out where to target new leads in the future and what kinds of methods to use.
- Test posts against each other. UTM parameters make it easy to A/B test ads and other types of content against each other, allowing you to quickly and clearly see the best approach and make tweaks to optimize your marketing in a range of different areas.
How to add UTM tags to your leads (the manual hard way!)
1. Create additional fields in your CRM for each UTM parameter
2. Add a script to your website to read the Google Analytics client ID from that session (you can no longer fetch this from UTMZ cookies any more.
3. Setup Hidden fields in your form for each UTM parameter
4. Use the Google Analytics API to pull the UTM details using the client ID captured in step 2.
5. Add the UTM details to the new hidden fields in your form to send through to your CRM system
Using Driftrock forms to capture UTM parameters
With Driftrock forms you can automatically add UTM tags as hidden fields to your leads, allowing you to start taking advantage of all the benefits of UTM parameters with very little difficulty.
Here's how it works with Driftrock:
1. Sign up for a Driftrock account and create your first form
2. Embed the form on your website or use a popup form experience
3. Connect your Google Account account to Driftrock
4. Connect your CRM account to Driftrock
5. You're done!
What CRMs can Driftrock send UTM tags and leads to?
Any CRM or email management system!
Driftrock can be used to integrate into any system. Either choose from an off-the-shelf integration, or we can build a new connector or custom integration.
Popular UTM integrations include Salesforce, Pipedrive, Active Campaign, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Zoho CRM.
Bonus lead tracking feature!
As well as tagging your leads and sending UTM parameters to your CRM or email management system, Driftrock can automatically pull back conversions from your CRM.
This means you can report and track leads from source through to purchase without needing to build your own reports or pesky pivot tables!
Staying GDPR & Privacy complaint
Driftrock acts as your Data Processor, and it's likely you will be the Data Controller. It's important that you comply with GDPR or other Data Protection laws when you capture any personal data. In this case, you should ask for adequate consent for tracking leads in this way.
Whilst you should seek your own legal advice, a handy tip is to add a cookie consent dialog and block the tracking of Google Analytics entirely if the customer does not give content. This means that no tracking information will reach your forms or CRM by default.
Now, you’re ready to start taking advantage of all the insights and value that UTM parameters can offer, getting more out of your marketing, and gaining the ability to truly see where your leads are coming from.
