utm campaign attribution - 10 reasons

UTM Campaign Attribution: 10 Solid Reasons To Invest In It

July 5, 2023
CampaignTrackly

In this blog post, we will explore 10 compelling reasons why investing in UTM campaign attribution is a great way to maximize marketing goals and drive faster growth.

Table Of Contents
  1. In this blog post, we will explore 10 compelling reasons why investing in UTM campaign attribution is a great way to maximize marketing goals and drive faster growth.
  2. 1. Accurate Marketing Attribution
  3. 2. Data-Driven Decision Making
  4. 3. Streamlined Performance Evaluation
  5. 4. Budget Optimization
  6. 5. Simplified Channel Comparison
  7. 6. Fast Campaign Optimization
  8. 7. Holistic Customer Journey Understanding
  9. 8. Personalized User Experience
  10. 9. Improved Conversion Tracking
  11. 10. Easier A/B Testing and Experimentation
  12. Conclusion
  13. Craft an Unbeatable Campaign Tagging & Tracking Process In 5 Simple Steps

If you are not currently investing in developing a sustainable UTM campaign attribution process that can optimize your marketing results, you should get started now. Here is why:

1. Accurate Marketing Attribution

Digital ad revenue in the U.S. rose 10.8% to $209.7 billion last year as marketers continued to spend in online channels despite slower economic growth, market uncertainty and mass layoffs at big tech companies

UTM campaign attribution is the most important part of your entire Marketing Attribution setup because it provides accurate insights into which owned and paid marketing channels are driving conversions.

Since paid digital advertising is claiming the biggest chunk of your marketing budget, you need accurate and reliable measurement to help you weed out under-performing campaigns, so that you can focus on the activities that bring the highest ROI.

Why UTM Campaign Attribution is critical for your marketing success - see spend budgets and prepare to be shocked.
Digital Ad Spending Graph courtesy of insiderintelligence.com

By tagging your marketing URLs with UTM parameters, you can attribute traffic and conversions to specific campaigns, sources, mediums, and more, ensuring a clear understanding of each channel’s impact.

2. Data-Driven Decision Making

UTM campaign attribution empowers you to make confident data-driven decisions.

The UTM tracking process seamlessly integrates with various analytics tools, such as Google Analytics. This enables you to access detailed reports, visualizations, and customized dashboards that provide in-depth insights into your overall digital marketing performance and how it stacks up against your custom email or paid campaigns.

Avoid Costly Mistakes: See How Lack of UTM Tags Sent a Campaign to Google Analytics’ General Referral Traffic

Why You Need Accurate UTM Campaign Attribution

With precise insights into campaign performance, you can use the information to understand better what your target customer engages with. You can then optimize your marketing strategies and messaging, allocate budgets effectively, and even identify new products or product uses that drive the best return on investment (ROI).

For example, according to Unscrambl.com, Netflix was able to develop its popular ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Arrested Development’ hits after methodical data analysis including 3 million searches and over 4 million ratings.

3. Streamlined Performance Evaluation

Customers today rarely interact with your company only on one single channel. They are likely to have multiple touch points across multiple media and sources.

Investing in UTM campaign attribution enables you to evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns in a comprehensive way, preventing isolated decisions that might be missing the bigger picture.

It can help bring down silos, identify economies of scale, and even uncover key trends in user behaviors that can showcase better ways to attract customers.

For example, according to this WordStream blog, you can use trends from one marketing channel to fine-tune your strategies on another channel:

  • Using PPC data to optimize your web copy for SEO can result in higher SEO clickthrough rates
  • Associating PPC keywords with the customer journey stage can help understand better user searches, improve content and calls to action, and even reduce funnel drop offs on your website.
I saw 135% rise in conversion rate and 124% rise in conversions. For 6% less of the weekly budget
Ivan Dimitrov, PCloud
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By the way, one such platform that could help you leverage your PPC data to better understand user behavior and create more effective campaigns is Airtomic. With this website, you can track user searches and create better content that resonates with your target audience.

4. Budget Optimization

With UTM campaign attribution, you can allocate your marketing budget more efficiently. By identifying the channels that generate the most conversions and provide the highest ROI, you can invest your resources where they are most likely to yield positive outcomes.

We use email marketing, sales funnel, and CRM software and track our most important marketing metrics including CAC and CLV. We review our top metrics daily and then drill down if needed and adjust marketing spend if needed.

Craft an Unbeatable Campaign Tagging & Tracking Process In 5 Simple Steps

See how easy it is to build a consistent, error-free reporting process

Read the Blog

5. Simplified Channel Comparison

UTM parameters allow you to compare the performance of different marketing channels directly. You can assess the impact of organic search, paid advertising, social media, email marketing, and other channels, enabling you to focus on the ones that drive the most conversions and align with your business goals.

6. Fast Campaign Optimization

Your website copy, blog content, social media content, advertising … you create these with who in mind? Your customers. Without customer data, your content creation process would be a shot in the dark.

Investing in UTM campaign attribution provides consistent insights that enable you to optimize your campaigns at any given point in time.

By analyzing UTM-tagged URLs, you can identify which campaign elements (such as ad copy, visuals, or targeting) resonate best with your audience, leading to improved engagement and conversion rates.

7. Holistic Customer Journey Understanding

UTM campaign attribution helps you build a holistic view of the customer journey. Because of its easy integration into your analytics tool and process, you can track every single interaction from initial touch points to final conversions.

Sharing data from across channels can enable you to map the paths users take and identify potential areas for improvement in your funnel.

For example, collecting demographic information from your current existing customers collected from surveys and purchasing behavior, can be applied to improve segmentation, funnels and calls to action for your lead generation process.

8. Personalized User Experience

According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and 76% get frustrated when companies don’t.

By leveraging UTM campaign attribution, you can deliver better, more personalized user experiences. With detailed insights into customer behavior and preferences, you can tailor your messaging, content, and offers to specific audience segments, increasing engagement and conversion rates.

RocksBox has a multi-touchpoint data collection strategy that starts with a customer survey. The survey is then to segment subscribers based on their personal jewellery tastes. 
Subscribers can then favorite pieces of jewelry from the website that they would like to have in future boxes. In addition, customers can leave direct feedback on previous boxes they received. All of these data points are collected and allow RocksBox to deliver highly personalized products to their customers. This level of personalization builds brand loyalty and keeps customers coming back every month for their next box.

9. Improved Conversion Tracking

Assigning specific business goals to conversions on your website and marrying it with UTM tracking enables you to quickly and reliably identify the best sources for your newsletter sign-ups, form submissions, or purchases.

By attributing conversions to specific campaigns, you can calculate the cost per acquisition (CPA) and ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) more effectively, allowing you to make informed decisions about where to invest your resources to improve lead generation.

10. Easier A/B Testing and Experimentation

Using UTM term and additional custom tags, you can easily conduct A/B testing and experimentation more effectively. By tagging different variations of your campaigns, you can analyze the performance of each variant, optimize your messaging, and refine your marketing strategies based on data-backed insights.

Philips found that by implementing a slide-in call to action (CTA), newsletter signups increased by 635%. Removing auto-play on videos improved product views by 15.85%. All of these decisions were backed by concrete data collected and utilized to make informed content marketing decisions.

Conclusion

Making marketing decision without being backed by reliable and accurate data insights is a thing of the past. And UTM campaign attribution is an integral part of your overall marketing data strategy that will fuel your productivity, optimize marketing results and enable you to create more value for your company, faster.

Hopefully the 10 reasons for using UTM campaign attribution as one of your top tools to optimize performance will help you not only convince any skeptic, but also gain more clout in front of your leadership.