Mastering Funnels - Setting Up UTM Tracking & Finding The Data in Google Analytics
Jul 26, 2022Learn more about how UTM Tracking, UTM Tracking Generators, UTM Tracking in Real Time, and Finding UTM Data on Google Analytics help you master funnels. Watch our recent Livestream on YouTube or you may also listen to our podcast on Spotify.
In this live, we covered a few important and timely topics, including:
1) UTM Tracking
2) UTM Tracking Generators
3) UTM Tracking in Real Time
4) Finding UTM Data on Google Analytics
5) Your Questions
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@mrjasonwilmot 🤔 How does UTM Tracking work using Weberlo? Check out this video. #DigitalMarketing #weberlo #UTM #Entrepreneur #marketing #growthmarketing #growthstrategy #growthhacking ♬ Aesthetic - Tollan Kim
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[TRANSCRIPTION]
"All right. Hey, folks, Jason Wilmot here. Excited to be doing this podcast live today. Today is July 25, and typically I do this podcast on Tuesdays, but I'm going to be headed out of town tomorrow with my wife, and so I thought it would be best to do this today. Now, I don't have that much time today to be doing this podcast, so I hope that we can make this as impactful as possible.
We have a ton of people on TikTok right now who are following us live. I'm absolutely thrilled that you guys are joining us. If you want to come over to the YouTube channel, I'm going to be sharing my screen here in just a second. So if you want to learn about UTM and tracking and those elements, that's what we're talking about today. Now, I know that a lot of folks visit us or listen to this on Spotify.
So hello to you as well, and then hello to all of the other streams and sources that we are broadcasting on today. If you have a question, go ahead and drop it. Now, what we're talking about today is we're just going to focus on tracking. Now, tracking isn't necessarily a very exciting word in the land of digital ads, but as an agency owner, your tracking is going to improve your retention of your clients. If you have your own offer, tracking is obviously everything that you need to know, because at the end of the day, what tracking is is ROI on your campaigns.
So specifically, when I'm talking about tracking, what we are talking about in this regard is clicks coming to your website or your landing page. How do you determine how effective those clicks are? When I first started marketing, first started doing Internet marketing, I got the idea of ads and how effective they were. You would obviously find slivers of traffic that were interested either in interests or by queries. And then what you would do is you would send those folks to your website.
Well, lo and behold, that is not the entire puzzle. What we ultimately want to do is we want to be able to send clicks into our website, but then we want to understand how those clicks are actually performing. So imagine this. Imagine that you're spending $50 a day or $100 a day on ads. And I know that that is a lot for some people and that is just a pinch for others.
But imagine that you're spending your money, your own money, or you are a steward of somebody else's money if you're running ads on behalf of them. At the end of the day, we all want to win. Either you as an agency owner, your client, or if you have your own offer, you want to win. Because ultimately the customer is getting what they want, which is your offer. You are getting an exchange of value for that, and that is revenue.
And then what you want to do is understand where that revenue is coming from. So imagine this. Imagine if you just took, you have a $100 a day budget and you divided that budget up. You put 50% of it on Facebook and Instagram, 50% of it on YouTube or maybe TikTok. So how do you speed effectively there?
Well, you turn on the ads and then you start seeing what is going to move the needle. Now that used to be a little bit easier back when Facebook and Google and these platforms had better attribution you could see that attribution that analytics in your dashboard. But the days of that is gone. You can't rely on the Facebook dashboard, Facebook, and Instagram ads dashboard to get you that information that is ultimately kind of going on on your website if somebody has opted out of cookies. Now there is something called conversion API, which definitely helps with all of that.
But let's pretend that you don't have that on your website at the moment. Let's pretend that you are sending folks from somewhere and this doesn't even have to be paid. This could be organic. This could be from your link tree or your bio or from your YouTube page. How do you actually connect the click all the way down to that customer or conversion or that lead?
That's what we're going to be talking about today. And that's what I'm going to be showing you on my screen. And I think before I dive in and talk about how we set this up, what I want you to be thinking about is this. Ultimately you are putting in your time, your money, or your energy in driving people to your offer. It is to your advantage to add tracking elements to those.
And again, I talk about this in Mastering Funnels. I kind of walk you through the whole process. But this is a process that should take place in your brain whenever you are about to send a click to your website or run ads. In this case, what we want to do is we want to attach something to that click so we know how that click actually behaves on your page. Because at the end of the day, you could be getting leads left and right from something like TikTok.
And maybe you're only getting a handful from Facebook and Instagram. But it doesn't matter about the number of leads, it matters about the quality. And so what you're doing with those clicks coming from TikTok or from YouTube or from Instagram or Facebook, what you're going to be able to do with these things called UTMs is you're going to understand their behavior on your website. And when I mean behavior, I mean, did they go to this page? Did they click on this button?
How long on the page were they, did they opt into your offer? What was the conversion rate of that? And so over time, if you're sending in traffic, what you're going to see are you're going to see patterns of data. So these patterns of data you're going to be able to break down. Is it TikTok?
Is that Facebook? Is it Instagram? Now, below that you're going to be able to go even lower. Okay, so it's Facebook. Let's just say it's Facebook.
In this case, what ad group is it? Now, typically at the ad group level, in Facebook, you're split testing audiences. So this could be a lookalike audience, this could be an interest-based audience. This could be an expansion-based audience. This could be a demographic-based audience.
This could be a placement-based audience. So again, ad set on most campaigns is you're thinking about who am I targeting and where are they seeing this, where am I placing this ad, where is somebody seeing this and who then at the ad level? What we're trying to do is ultimately we're trying to understand what is our best ad? And by ad I mean the angle, the copy, the image, the video, all of those elements combined. So if you have something like 20 ads, if you have multiple ad groups, how can you determine which the most effective ad set is and then within that ad set, how can you determine which ad is most effective?
The answer to this is tracking. The answer to this is sending in clicks to your website with these UTM tracking parameters where you can then identify who is actually opting in. Now why that makes sense at the end of the day, let's just say that you spent money and you ran ads for an entire month. Well, when you look back on that month, the one wholly metrics that you are looking at in your analytics is your conversion rate. So your conversion rate would be how many people actually arrived at that website and then how many people actually opted in.
Just depending upon your offer, it could be a 1% conversion rate, it could be a 5% conversion rate, it could be a 10%, I don't know. So if you're running ads to a webinar, the conversion rate would be how many of those people that you send to the website actually opt-in. So from there, what you would determine is where is my best source of traffic, where are my clicks coming in, where they're actually converting. Now from there you're probably going to want to be able to pass that information into your sales system. So if you have a CRM, you want to know where these people originally opted in because if they come back to buy or they come back to book a phone call, what you're going to be able to do is kind of trace those folks backwards to understand where they originally came from.
And that is the goal because what you're trying to do is you're trying to kind of uncover, well, where are the best leads coming from which ad, which ad set, which campaign, which source. So if you have questions on any of that and how to kind of go in between those, hit me up in the comments and then I will be able to address it. So what I'm going to shift to now though, in the podcast is walking me through. I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to show you how to create a UTM and where those live inside your Google Analytics. So I'm going to my screen and we're going to get rolling on this.
So you see on my screen, it should look like a spreadsheet. So really there's five different levels inside of a UTM and currently Universal Analytics and Google Analytics, you can dial into all five of these pieces. And in G4, you can only have three options to send in your three placements to send in your UTM information. I'll come back on that when we have a better path forward with G4. So what I'm going to be showing you right now is in Universal Analytics.
So in Universal Analytics we have an architecture, and again, this is all about syncing correctly. We have an architecture in which we need to send in ads. And so the source is the original click source of that first click. It's the highest category, if you will. So this would be Facebook ads, this would be TikTok ads, this could be YouTube ads.
If you're organic, this would be YouTube organic, this could be an email. And so the source is ultimately kind of the highest point in that. And then you can start getting a little bit more nuanced than this. So the medium here, you might want to use CPC if it's a cost per click, maybe you want to type in organic if that would make the most sense. If it's an organic click.
And then this is where the campaign comes involved. The campaign is a little bit lower. And if this is Facebook, we would write Facebook the name of the Facebook ad campaign right here. And then the UTM content level is where we would put the ad set. And then the UTM term is where we would put the ad.
Now if you were listening or watching last week, I walked you through how to do this automatic. There's a baked in element that you can just add these next to. I mean, it takes about 30 seconds to do. So watch that or listen to it if you haven't gotten a chance. Let's just say that I have to do this manually.
And the reason why I'm going to do this manually is I'm going to show you how to check this in your Google Analytics in real time to see if you're doing this. So I kind of came up with an example. This link does not live out in the wild, nor will it, because it just doesn't make sense. So let's just say my source, let's just say I put out this source of Mastering Funnels Live. But this is my podcast live.
Now obviously this would be an organic click because I'm not paying for any of these clicks. The campaign, if I wanted to kind of continue to add nuance to this link, this would be episode six because that is the current episode that we're on the YouTube content. I probably wouldn't put too many things in here because again, this is an organic example. So maybe you only need kind of these tiers. So what I'm going to do though is I've got this UTM concatenator and there's free UTM generators.
If you want access to this, just hit me up, I'll give it to you. And so what you can do with this UTM generator is you can type in your certain parameters at these levels. And then this function over here to my right, if you're just listening, it's a concatenation formula in Google spreadsheet where it's just taking all of these elements and it's nesting in the source, the medium, the campaign, the content, and the term. I happen to just have this baked in because this is something that I've been making and using for years. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to a new tab and paste this in.
Now if you see this at the top of my screen, if you're watching this, you'll see that there's just a giant string of characters. And it may not make sense to you, but if you start watching your clicks, you're going to see that this is what people are actually tracking. So I'm going to hit enter and this is going to go to my website. Okay, we're here. So what did it do?
Well, let me show you actually what is happening in the back end of my analytics. So in the back end of my analytics, what I've just sent in is a click. And there it is. It just showed up. So you'll see the sources podcast live.
The medium is organic and so this is a way of testing. So I am in real time traffic sources. So this is going to give you this feedback on where your clicks are actually coming from. So if you want to test UTMs before you actually throw them onto ads, this is where you test it. And so we have the medium that you just saw in the source.
So the source is kind of the most important part. But then as you get more nuanced, you are going to see different degrees of these UTMs. So let's take this. Let's take this and work with it. So really at the end of the day, the idea about being very effective and getting really good at this game of scaling up and paying ads, it really has to come down to one, you need to be able to think through what you're about to do before you do it.
So if you're thinking, I'm going to run ads and then I need to add these UTM so I can track them all the way through, that is step one. You have to just think and know. You have to be aware of these UTMs, and then you have to actually go in and create them so that they pass the information incorrectly. But then after that, the next component is going in and understanding where this data is inside your analytics. And then the fourth component would obviously be looking at that, understanding the patterns of data, and then going back to your Facebook ad campaign or wherever you're running your ads and make the adjustments necessary.
Because Facebook isn't going to do that for you. Facebook is going to optimize towards your conversion. It'll probably optimize towards it making revenue as well. But if you can't trust the algorithm, you need to be able to trust your data. All right, so we're in our Google Analytics right now, and I showed you how to test that.
So again, we have the short link. We created this. I shouldn't call this a short link because the short link is not what a short link is. If you are looking at my screen, what I could do in this case is take this long string of characters and then condense it down into something like a bit.ly link or my own link shortening tool. So that way I have all my tracking elements involved, but it just doesn't look so ugly.
So I've got my UTM parameters here. I've built this link and now I've clicked and I've shown you how to go in and actually find this. Now the next component is going into your Google Analytics and trying to surface where this information lives. So before I go too much farther, what I should say is this. And I want to give a plug for Mastering Funnels, because what I'm about to show you is the next step in this week two.
We talk about conversions. So the whole idea behind taking a UTM is actually tying it to a conversion. So the conversion that I'm about to show you in this next piece is people coming to the training or the case study coming to that. It's a video case study. So people coming to the video case study and those who opt-in.
And so what I'm looking from there is I'm trying to understand the different conversion rate of the folks coming from different sources. Now, I'm not actually spending a whole lot of money at the moment. We're actively scaling up the Facebook ads and we're using single image ads to actually drive traffic to this. So I'll show you the results of that here in a second. But that is key.
UTMs in and of themselves are great, but what a UTM does is connect that click all the way to the conversion. And you have to have that conversion first. And in this case, the conversion is typically the thing that is moving your business forward. Whether it's somebody booking a phone call, whether it's somebody buying from you, whether they're opting into something, downloading something, requesting a call, booking a demo, whatever it is, that conversion needs to happen before this UTM works. So the conversion that I'm about to show you is somebody who gets to this website and then ultimately decides they want to put in their email to watch the case study.
So again, I'm going to share my screen here just to give you a little bit of context for that. So again, here is the page. If somebody wants to watch this video case study, there is a requirement to put in your email. Once they do that, that is the conversion, right? That is what I'm training Facebook to go do at this moment.
I'm training Facebook to go find people who are interested in this offer of scaling up their own funnel to hit a million dollars in revenue. I'm targeting folks who are on click funnels, trying to scale up their offer. And then so if they opt-in to this funnel, I'm going to have something fire in the back end called the conversion. This conversion also lives on Facebook in a custom conversion, but it also lives in my Google Analytics. So I can see this.
Now, why do I want to use my Google Analytics? Well, I want to use my Google Analytics because that is going to show me the diversity across multiple sources. So if I'm running ads in multiple places, let's say it's TikTok on one side or Facebook on the other, I can compare apples to apples and understand my conversion rate per source. Or I could even break it down on Facebook per campaign, per ad, set per ad. So this is a conversion if they opt-in.
Now, one thing before I go on, it is very important to set that custom conversion on Facebook. And we've talked about this in the past, because that is what enables your machine learning to activate. So people opt-in right here. What are we seeing on the analytics side? Now, this number isn't entirely correct because 123 people haven't done in the last few days.
123 folks have not hit that website. What you're going to see sometimes is bump in these clicks. Because what you will find is whenever you publish new ads on Facebook, it's going to come crawl your website and it's going to drive that traffic number up. So if you start ads and there's like 100 or unique that come in, that's probably not people.
That is Facebook Chronicle website to make sure that everything is in compliance. So I'm in here, right? I've got these. My goal in this case was a page view. That's the conversion.
So I'm over here in source medium. I'm in acquisition all traffic source Medium. There's my source. There's my Medium. It's Facebook underscore Ads and then under CPC underlined if I click into this, you can start seeing the name of my campaign, the name of my ad sets, and the name of my ads.
Because over time, I'm going to find a pattern that is evident across all of these clicks and say, okay, this is where I'm seeing the best ROI in what I'm doing. So I'm going to go down to goal 16 because this is the people who have actually opted in. And so over the weekend, I had about nine folks opt into this. And again, I'm not spending a lot of money at all. I'm getting ready to scale this, spend more money.
But I wanted to wiggle out and test some ad creatives first. So this is the metric right here though, 6.3%. Now if I change the date, this should change as well. I mean, over time, you're not going to see yeah, over time, you're not going to see that maybe it's not, maybe that already was a date, but over time, what you're going to see is you're going to see the overall conversion rate. So if you have like a baseline of 4.27, or maybe it's ten, or maybe it's 15, what you're eventually going to see, you're going to be able to rank order these of, okay, where are my ads actually being the most effective?
They're coming to the website, they're opting in at this rate. You have your baseline here, you have your campaign and Medium right here. Again, you could go to I could add a secondary dimension of campaign. I could do that with Ads, I could do that with Ad Set, but that's ultimately going to give me all of the information, all the information that I know to make heads or tails of this. Now that isn't going to be the end all, be all.
Remember, Google Analytics is last quick attribution only. So there's a lot of stuff that might happen prior to that. They might see my ad somewhere on TikTok or on Facebook. They might come to the website, they leave, they get retargeted, and then they opt-in. So that could be something too.
So you have to understand that this is not the entire journey. We talked about how to do or tracking the entire journey last week using tools like Weberlo using tools like Hyros. So that is a way to kind of capture the entire journey. But inside of Google Analytics, this is your last click. So if folks are checking you out, they come back.
If they see your ad, they leave, then they come back to your website and then opt-in organically. Well, then you're not going to see that in here. You're going to have a conversion for your Organic, your Google Organic, or your Direct, which is the case right here. So somebody left or they opted in somewhere here. If you have email marketing like Kajabi Email Drip, you'll see that as soon as you start understanding UTM information, you're going to start adding your UTMs everywhere.
So they're in every single email that we use. It's on our Facebook call to action. It's in our link tree. It's on our UTM videos. Sorry, it's in our YouTube videos.
When people click through, everything is tracked because I ultimately want to know what is actually going to move the needle for us moving forward. So that is the key to understanding and utilizing utms. So again, we don't have a whole lot of time today for questions. Normally this podcast is about 40 to 45 minutes long just because I have more time. But again, I'm going out of town tomorrow and don't have time to record the podcast tomorrow.
So we're kind of doing a condensed version here today. Now, I do have one question.
I'm not sure if we covered this last week or not. It's in my queue waiting to, no, it was this one. So what do you use as a lead magnet for your funnel? This was one question. So we'll have one question and then we will get rolling.
So I'll read it one more time. What do you usually use as a lead magnet for lead magnet in your funnel? So this really depends on what sort of funnel that you're running. I think a good lead magnet before we get to you could go down such a long path here, a rabbit hole here. But I think ultimately what you need to do use as a lead magnet is something that's absolutely valuable.
It could be free, it could be just a tiny fraction of a cost, but something that is going to inevitably provide you with a little bit of the information to activate either follow up on your half, whether it's an SMS drip, whether it's an email drip, whether it's a messenger drip, but something that somebody actually finds useful. So maybe that's a PDF, maybe that is a PDF or an ebook where somebody is coming to the website they put in their email or something to give them something of value. But I think, again, it has to just be valuable. And what value in my mind means is something that's ultimately going to build trust with this person. Trust, meaning you have taught them something, you have given them insight, you have helped them kind of get from A to B, or they're starting to get there because of the resource that you provided.
Now there's other resources that you can use. So I have a $27 mini workshop. It's about 2 hours long. Somebody can come to the mini workshop and it's called Retargeting IQ. I teach them how to think about retargeting, how to set up their Google Analytics, how to set up their UTMs, and then how to set up their retargeting on Facebook and Instagram.
And then from there, they know that there's going to be continued upsells. Join the Mastering Funnels course or if somebody wants coaching. So you have to have the funnel in mind of what you're going to do once you have this giveaway or this lead magnet. So if you have that lead magnet in place, obviously understand what you're trying to do with it so that you have the funnel built. But yeah, as far as something like what is a good lead magnet, I would just say, what is something valuable?
Go through your inbox, go through what you've done, what you've opted into, and use that as an example. If you put out junk and you just have people opt into your junk, they're going to feel that you're not going to establish the trust that you wanted to do by just giving them something, right? If somebody has to give you their email, there's some social capital involved with having to put my email into things. So that's a little bit guarded. But if I can do that, and if I can get something that's actionable, that's valuable, that's educational, and that where I just trust you a little bit more, then that's really what you're trying to do.
And the last thing that I would say on this is if you are using lead magnets, what you should do, in my opinion, is go ahead and build out that conversion in your Google Analytics. So if somebody downloads something, if somebody downloads that ebook or that PDF, what you can then do is you can go in and track that in your analytics and then obviously go ahead and add those UTMs to those clicks so that you can track those people coming to your lead magnet and opting in. All right, folks, that is all the time that we have today. Unfortunately, it's just 25 minutes. I will be back next week, though, and we'll have a full-length episode then.
So if you have questions between now and then, go ahead and drop them in the comments. I know most of the people watch this recorded or after the fact. So if you have questions about marketing, if you have questions about funnels, in this case, let's say if you have questions about tracking, I mean, if you have a doozy, send it my way too, and I'll be able to dig into that. But I just want to thank you for your time for tuning in today. I want to thank you for your listing in our ship and just want to wish you a very happy week moving forward.
And we'll see you next week. I hope everybody is doing well. Take care and we'll see in the next episode. All right, adios guys. Bye."