in this video you're going to learn how
to set up utm tracking for your facebook
ads
so basically what utm tracking allows
you to do
is get more data and more granularity
inside your google analytics report
and that's fantastic and it's really
important right now especially
because with apple's upcoming ios 14
privacy changes
they're due to come in march 2021 at the
moment um so depending on when you're
watching this they might already be in
place or they might not
but basically when those changes roll
out we're going to lose quite a bit of
data
inside of our facebook ad reports so utm
tracking and utm parameters
are one way to actually still get that
data but get it via google analytics
because google analytics
and utm tracking will not be affected by
this change
and in case you're thinking well i'm
already using google analytics why do i
have to set something else up
basically if you're using google
analytics it probably looks something
like this right now
and as you can see we've only got really
generic information here we've got
google
organic we've got direct none which
basically means google analytics doesn't
know where the traffic came from
we've got facebook and l.facebook.com
again i don't know if that's organic
traffic from facebook or ad traffic from
facebook
and then you can see my email platform
active campaign youtube instagram it's
all just super generic i've got no idea
where in terms of which content the
actual clicks are coming from and i
can't track that through to conversions
properly
because i just don't know if it's
organic if it's ads or what it is
but when we set up our utm parameters
and our utm tracking for our facebook
ads
i'm going to be able to see exactly
which campaign which ad set
and which ad was responsible for the
click and i can track that right through
to conversions and i'll even be able to
see how much
revenue came from particular ads that
people clicked in facebook
so you can see now in this example of a
google analytics account that uses utm
parameters i've got much more detail
i've got facebook ads in the facebook
news feed i've got facebook ads and
instagram
stories i've even got instagram organic
and the instagram feed so i can split
out organic versus
ads it's a much more detailed report and
i can further drill down
and then see exactly which ad it was so
you can see i've got image one text one
image two text one etc etc
and the best part again is that this
won't be affected
by the upcoming ios 14 changes so once
those privacy changes roll
out i'm still going to be able to get
this same data if i set up my utm
parameters correctly
inside of google analytics that's the
good news
the bad news is that utm parameters do
have some downsides and the main thing
you need to know about
is they really break down when it comes
to cross-domain tracking
so for example if i have a page on my
website let's say i'm using andrew
hubbard.co forward slash webinar
and i'm sending ad traffic to that page
and people can sign up for a webinar
now if i do that and i have my utm
parameters set up properly and people
sign up for the webinar
and let's say the thank you page that
people see immediately after registering
for the webinar is
andrew hubbard dot co forward slash
thank you
well that's going to track just fine and
i'm going to be able to track
everything inside my google analytics
report with
great detail however if i was using a
webinar platform and i was using one of
their own built-in thank you pages on
one of their sub domains
so for example if my thank you page was
andrew hubbard
dot easywebinar.com forward slash thank
you
then that conversion wouldn't track
properly and i wouldn't be able to see
in my reports
which ad that person came through before
converting and i should say inside my
google analytics reports there
specifically
because i'm crossing over onto the
webinar domain when before i was on my
andrew hubbard.co domain
so that's the downside if you do use a
lot of different domains
when you're running facebook ads and
people are hitting your site and then
crossing over to multiple different
domains
it's not going to be as good for you is
it still worth doing absolutely
definitely set utn parameters up but
just know that there is that downside so
you should be trying to get everything
on the same domain
wherever possible to make this tracking
as good as it can potentially be
okay so now we're going to head over to
the ads manager i'm going to show you
exactly how to set up your utm
parameters
for your facebook ads now the first
thing you want to do
is create a new campaign just like you
would normally create a campaign so i'll
just do it quickly here
i'll choose a conversion campaign and
click continue and what you need to do
from here is go down to the ad
level so you'd set up your campaign just
as you would normally
nothing different there in terms of how
you set up your campaign
this simple change is just happening at
the ad level so go to your ad
scroll down to the bottom and set up
your ad you know as you normally would
put in your url so i'm going to show you
right here
i will put this in as my url
now once you've done that scroll down to
the bottom
and you'll see down here you've got url
parameters optional
all we want to do is click build a url
parameter
now from here we just enter data into
each of these fields now the campaign
source i like to put facebook
ads okay i like to leave it as facebook
ads meaning the source
of this traffic is facebook ads campaign
medium
now this is where i like to put my
placement so i just click here and i
click
placement now what this means with the
double curly brackets
is it's going to enter a dynamic piece
of data
in here meaning facebook will pre-fill
the placement
placeholder here with whatever placement
the person clicked on
so this will automatically get filled in
with the placement that the ad was shown
so you don't have to
set this up manually you just put it in
there say placement facebook will
automatically populate whatever the
placement is
next campaign name i like to put in
campaign name and that's going to take
the name of my actual ad campaign
and pop it in here as my utm parameter
now campaign content i actually like to
put add name so it's going to put my
actual
ad name in here and send it over
and then i like to add a parameter and
just put in add
set name and then the value here
is the ad set name so now it's going to
send all of those different dynamic
pieces of data
over to google analytics via our utm
parameters
now we simply click apply you can see
down here it's got url parameters here
and it's got all of those utm parameters
that we just
entered now what's going to happen is
whenever somebody clicks on the link in
your ad so you can see i've got my link
right here facebook will automatically
append those url parameters on the end
of your url every time so you don't need
to enter them manually
you just enter the url by itself like
this now i should note
if you add the url into the primary text
of your ad
and somebody clicks on the url inside
the copy or the primary text of your ad
then the utm parameters will be applied
as well so this is a great way to do it
because it's going to add
the url parameters to the text inside
your copy
without you having to manually add them
inside the copy and making
the link look like a big long ugly mess
right so whenever somebody clicks it
it's automatic
now one thing i'll note is if you
preview your ads
and you want to test those links and you
click the links facebook
will not add the url parameters or the
utm parameters
to those links when you're viewing it as
a preview but it will when the ad
is live so don't stress if you go and
you test your ads and you click the
links and you notice that the utm
parameters
haven't been added it will actually be
added when it's live and when real users
are clicking your ads
it just won't show up on your testing
okay so really important to note that
so that's it that's all you have to do
to set up the parameters what i think is
really important and what i'm going to
show you now is how to actually use this
data
and view it inside google analytics
all right so back over to the computer
and now i'm on my google analytics
dashboard
so if you go to google analytics which
is analytics.google.com
this is how you actually see the data
that is coming through by your utm
parameters
okay so let's go down to acquisition and
we'll click that drop down and then
we'll go to
all traffic source slash medium now you
can see we've got
google organic direct none but if you
scroll down a little bit
we can actually see facebook ads and the
facebook news feed facebook ads
instagram stories we've got instagram
organic we've got instagram
referral and i think if we click show
more we'll probably see
some youtube stuff so youtube and then
video description so somebody clicked a
link from my youtube video description
so we can actually see now we're getting
more granular data
and we can go up here and click on other
search for content click add content now
we can actually see
the actual ads people clicked on so
we've got image one text one image two
text one image
two text two organic carousel ad and
everything else we've got coming through
so this report actually shows you which
individual piece of content
people are clicking on when they're
coming through and you can see here i've
got my goals over here
so if you have goal tracking set up
inside google analytics
you will actually be able to see how
many leads you got from these and even
how many sales and the conversion value
from those sales will show up
right here in the analytics report as
well so i'm going to go back to source
medium and i'm going to actually go
secondary dimension and i'm going to
search for content here
and click on that and that's going to
give the column here
next to the source so now i can actually
see facebook ads news feed and they
clicked image one text one
and i can go through and see how many
pages they visited
i can see how many times they completed
certain goals and everything else so you
can see i've got that much more granular
data so now that you know how to view it
inside google analytics you really are
off to the raises you've got
your utm parameters set up you're going
to be able to see this inside google
analytics and understand your data
better
and you'll be even better prepared for
when you lose some data
inside facebook when the ios 14 privacy
changes
all roll out okay that is it for this
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you