Work and play in tech

Where did you all come from? UTM will tell me.

Johanna Månsson Grahn -

Today I logged on to ghost.io and found out that I had 77 views since my first post. Without knowing what you thought about it, I still have a little girl on my shoulder jumping up and down applauding, me like!

But where did you all come from? I have a clue, but I have no stats.

UTM with Google Analytics

Do you ever run a campaign, send e-mails, share content on twitter och facebook or do just anything else to drive traffic to your website? You probably keep a close look at your Google Analytics account to see which pages are most popular and where all the people came from. Urchin tracking module (UTM) is a way of adding a bit extra sugar to that Google Analytics data.

You simply create a link (or as many as you'd like) with a few extra parameters to feed GA with. This is a help: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

It could look something like this:

http://womenatwork.ghost.io/hello-chai-things/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=WallPost&utm_campaign=FirstBlogPost

http://womenatwork.ghost.io/hello-chai-things/?utm_source=CompanyWebsite&utm_medium=BusinessCard&utm_campaign=FirstBlogPost

When looking at your traffic data in Google Analytics,

  • utm_source is there to tell you where the traffic came from,
  • utm_medium should be how you shared the link and,
  • utm_campaign could be the campaign or reason for sharing.

Share the links you made and then you'll have a little extra statistics to feed that greedy girl on your shoulder.