You have created UTM parameters for your
incoming links that point to your website, this is really great.
UTM parameters are really a must have when it comes to source tracking,
knowing where your traffic is coming from and identifying this correctly in GA4.
Now, there are tons of tutorials out there
on how to actually create UTM parameters, but none of them really show how to read
the UTM parameters later on inside of your Google Analytics 4.
And that's what I want to show you today.
So to start us off, I'm here on our Google
Merchandise Store where we can buy all kinds of Google products.
This will be the case that we are working on right now.
They also have a great newsletter that you can sign up to.
And the links inside of the newsletter are obviously tagged with UTM parameters.
I'm not sure how Google is doing this internally, but we here at MeasureSchool
are using our UTM builder sheet, which our measure masters have access
to as well, where you can create your landing page URL.
You put that in here into the sheet,
then you choose your UTM medium, your UTM source, your campaign,
and UTM content, and even more of these parameters.
You don't have to use them,
but we have included also the new ones such as source platform, creative format,
and the marketing tactic, which are new UTM parameters.
In the end, the sheet will generate you
your UTM URL, which you can then use inside of your newsletter, for example.
Once a user clicks on this link in the newsletter and is directed back
to the website, let's simulate this really quickly here.
Then the UTMs get read by Google Analytics 4 and stored correctly.
Google Analytics 4 knows now where the user has come from.
Now, once you are inside of Google Analytics,
how can you now see your UTM parameters and read them correctly?
The first destination that you should
probably know about is under the Standard Reports.
You can go over to your Traffic Reports
under Acquisition, and then here we have Traffic Acquisition itself.
And this will really show you your UTMs already.
Although they are here by default channel
group, channel groups are different from UTM parameters.
So I'm going to switch over here to Session Source medium,
and it will give me all my source mediums that have been used.
Now, we should be able to also find our
source medium, which is Newsletter September 2022.
Well, actually, we need to go through the right date here.
So I'm going to go back to September.
And then we can look through and here we see Newsletter September 2022 email.
What about the other UTM parameters?
Well, you could add them in and say the campaign name.
I want to know about that one as well.
So campaign name.
And we have the session campaign.
And after a second here, we should be able to see here, okay,
here is our first campaign that we have entered as well into the sheet.
And that is the campaign that we are actually looking for.
But if you wanted to dig deeper now,
then it gets really complicated in this report because we will need to add some
filters in order to make this all work and find the right number.
That's why I always recommend to go
straight to the Exploration Reports right here.
And we'll put something together that is custom.
So let's go with a blank freeform report.
And now you need to know what you're
actually looking for and need to know what data you are putting together.
First of all, let's give this all a name.
So this is my UTM report.
And let's add the right dimensions and metrics.
In terms of metrics,
what I'm interested right now is just to see how many sessions did this generate.
I'm going to put in my sessions as the metric.
Then as the dimensions, I want to have all my UTM parameters.
Naming is a little bit weird inside of
GA4 at the moment, so we need to know the right dimensions.
You are always safe to put in session first.
Then we have our session medium here
we have our session source here, we have our session source platform.
This is also one.
We have our UTM term ad content, which would be the content itself,
and the campaign ID or the campaign name here as well.
We could also take session source medium, but as we are digging in,
this is my process of how I normally go through this.
I'm going to import this.
Now I'm going to start building the report.
First of all, as the value,
I want to have my sessions just so we can see some data coming in.
Then we start with the biggest bucket, which is our session medium.
Now I'm looking specifically for the email medium right here.
Once the report has built, I put this in the wrong space.
It's not column, we want to put this in our session medium here.
We get our first data of all our mediums that have been used.
Now, let me change over the reporting time frame again.
We're looking at September here.
That's just great because I'm not able to see the button to save this actually.
Let me just try this again.
I got the button right and it's loading.
We get our UTM medium right here, but we are actually looking for the source
as well, which would be Newsletter_Sept_2022.
Let's add the source here as well.
Here we get a lot of different mediums, but also our email, September 2022.
Now, what I can do is filter this data.
Obviously, there is a filter column down here that you could use and enter this.
But a far easier trick is to now just
click on this one and include only this selection.
So it will be filtered exactly on our medium email and our
session source being Newsletter_Sept_2022.
So now we are filtered on this one and we can actually get rid of these because if
we wanted to now add our campaign name, let's just do that.
It might get a bit bigger here and not as readable.
And we know that this information is actually already filtered.
So we can just get rid of the session source and the medium itself.
And we're looking only at the session
campaign but filter down to our email and newsletter source.
And here we already get some great insights.
There was a birthday campaign that went
out and there was a version 1 of the newsletter and a version 2.
As we can see, the version 1 was a version one of the newsletter and a version two.
And as we can see, the version one was
clicked, maybe, and we had much more traffic coming in.
If we wanted to look at other metrics, you could add them obviously as well.
For example, since this is an e-commerce store, transactions would make sense.
Let's put in our transactions as well into the values.
Here we go.
We also got more transactions on the first version.
We can already look at these two and compare them.
Now, there are more campaign UTMs here which would be UTM content as well.
Apparently, there was a Start Shopping button and then also a birthday banner.
Let's go in and actually add our content as well.
I think it's this one, the ad content.
We need to add it here to the rows.
I'm going to just do this right here.
Now it makes it all a little bit bigger
again and we might want to filter on certain points here.
Maybe let's just look at
the Start Shopping campaign right here and include only this selection.
This is the Start Shopping button
and that many people have clicked it actually and then transacted it.
This is the winner here.
I'm going to now look at my filters.
So the filter has been applied.
We are only looking at that specific ad content.
And I can again get rid of my campaign name here.
And then we're looking at the Start Shopping button.
What if you wanted to compare, for example, this Start Shopping button
with the version number 2 that was also in the sheet right here?
So we have one for version number one
and one for version number 1 and one for version number 2.
You could obviously say, Okay, I'm actually going to add an identifier.
This would be my campaign name here.
So we're going to add the campaign name again.
Now we are going to get rid of one
of the filters which would be, I think, right here.
Yes, we want to make sure that this is not being used anymore.
So let's go ahead.
We can just exit out here.
But we still see only the star dropping because that's in the actual filter.
Now we are comparing.
Unfortunately, we may need to make this smaller so we can see the version 1
against the version 2 button is performing in this way.
Apparently, this button has outperformed
and this version has outperformed this part of the newsletter.
Really already great insights that you can
get from this when working with your UTMs.
If you have them correctly documented,
you can go ahead and then dig into the data inside
of Google Analytics 4's Exploration section to see this one.
What if you wanted to actually then use this data later on to maybe compare it
against another shopping campaign or against another set of UTMs?
Well, what you can do at any point is also
right click here and then create a segment from this selection.
It will take all of the different filters and apply it to a new segment that can be
created and even made an audience out of this one if you wanted to, for example,
send that over to Google ads and retarget this one.
I'm going to put this in and say, Okay,
this is my birthday campaign and save this one.
Now, let's get rid of all of the different filters here.
Again, maybe look at a completely different set of UTMs, medium and source.
Then we could look at a certain CPC campaign here, for example.
Let's go ahead and make this one into an include only one.
Get rid of our rows here and add our ad content and our campaign name info.
I'm just going to pick a random one here.
We can make this one into a segment as well and then save this.
Now we can compare our two segments
against each other depending on what data you want to see here.
But I'm just going to go ahead and put
in our session medium, for example, as the row.
Let's get rid of the filters.
Now I'm going to add our two new segments that we have created in here side by side.
We can actually compare now, for example,
the transactions of the birthday campaign to the total value of both campaigns
together, or which one has performed better in certain areas.
Now, obviously, this doesn't quite make
sense with this source medium, but you could dig deeper and compare this
data side by side between these two segments itself.
It's really flexible if you know how to work with the data and make that work.
Obviously, there are many different other visualizations forms available.
If you want to see this over time or in a bar chart and so on,
just click on it, and then this will be generated by Google Analytics 4.
I hope this shows you how you can really
dig into UTM parameters and decode them inside of Google Analytics 4 to get
to the desired question, the answer that you are looking for inside of GA4.
It's really a matter of putting everything together, knowing where the data is,
and then slicing and dicing it so you can get two insights.
Know this is by no means the only analysis technique on UTM parameters.
Obviously, you could take that data out of Google Analytics 4 and analyze it
in a third party tool, or even put it onto a Looker Studio
dashboard, which is also something that we are a big fan of here at MeasureSchool.
If you're new to UTM parameters, I have just completed a course
on the fundamentals of using UTM parameters for your source tracking.
Check out the link in the description below with all the details.
And if you want to know more about
the capabilities of Google Analytics for Exploration section,
check out this video right over here as well as our playlist right here.
Now, my name is Julian. Until next time.