UTM Tracking
One crucial aspect of measuring your success with Rokt Calendar is being able to track how your promotion strategies and paid campaigns are performing. By keeping a close eye on your metrics, you can determine which strategies are the most powerful and cost effective, and dedicate energy and resources accordingly.
The best way to track performance is to append UTM parameters to all of your calendar URLs, as it will enable you to attribute the number of subscribers by source, medium and campaign. Once the URL has been appended, you will see the UTM source, medium and campaign in Rokt Calendar Analytics.
What Are UTM Parameters?
A UTM code is a simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name. This enables our analytics dashboard to tell you where subscribers came from as well as what campaign directed them to your Rokt Calendar calendar.
Paid Media
If you are running paid ads, it is imperative to append source, medium and campaign to your URLs so you can keep track of which campaigns are getting you the most bang for your buck. It is not a requirement to all use all of the UTM parameters, using a single parameter e.g. source will still provide tracking information. Here is an example of how appended URLs would look:
Flipboard Banner Ad: on.nflnetwork.com/preseason?utm_source=flipboard_banner_ad1&utm_medium=inapp&utm_campaign=fall2015
Paid Google Search: on.nflnetwork.com/preseason?utm_source=Google_Search&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=fall2015
Digital Integrations
All digital, mobile and in-app integrations should be appended by source, medium and campaign so you can keep track of how many subscribers are coming from your digital and mobile properties. It is important to differentiate between desktop and mobile/in-app buttons so you can tell where the majority of your traffic is coming from.
Here are examples of how these appended URLs could look like:
Desktop Button: on.fox.com/scream-queens?utm_source=desktop_button&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=fall2015
Mobile Button: on.fox.com/scream-queens?utm_source=mobile_button&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=fall2015
In-App Button: on.fox.com/scream-queens?utm_source=InApp_button&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=fall2015
Social Media
Append your social media links so you can tell how many subscribers are coming from Twitter and Facebook posts. You should also keep track of users that are coming from other sources on social media like a profile bio link, auto-reply tweet etc. For example:
Twitter Profile Bio: on.fox.com/empire?utm_source=Twitter_Profile&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fall2020
Twitter Auto-Reply: on.fox.com/empire?utm_source=Twitter_Reply&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fall2020
Facebook Post: on.fox.com/empire?utm_source=Facebook_Post&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fall2020
Adding UTM Tracking to Calendar URLs
To add tracking, just append snippet a of code to the end of all of your calendar URLs, listing the source and/or medium and/or campaign you want to track. Each would need to be defined as indicated below:
- utm_source=source_name
- utm_medium=medium_name
- utm_campaign=campaign_name
Using all of the above, the full string to be appended to the URL should look like this:
?utm_source=source_name&utm_medium=medium_name&utm_campaign=campaign_name
An appended URL should look like this:
on.fox.com/scream-queens?utm_source=source_name&utm_medium=medium_name&utm_campaign=campaign_name
Adding the snippets of code after the question mark doesn't affect anything on the page -- it just lets our system know that someone arrived through a certain source or overall marketing channel as part of a certain campaign.
Using these tracking tools will allow you to measure your performance in a real and tangible way, ensuring that you are getting the most out of your Rokt Calendar account.