Get the conversation going with UTM parameters for campaign tracking

When releasing a slate of marketing collateral, you may find yourself wondering exactly what is working or where things are going awry, and the answer to these questions can be anything but obvious. When things go well, we tend to overlook any lagging components of a campaign because the overall diagnostic skews positive, but knowing what is going well can mean the difference between a good follow-up campaign and one that misses the plot entirely. Luckily, we can now employ tracking strategies, like UTM parameters, to inform our response to our activity and repeat what bears repeating to enjoy continued success. There is, however, an even more sophisticated way of doing so. Let’s explore. 

Marketing without UTM campaign tracking or parameters

Marketing in the age of the attention economy is a strange, often fickle endeavor. Cheap tricks and sly hacks abound and so much of our efforts to market ourselves get reduced to tactics that are anything but sincere. Just think about the ways we’re taught to reel people in. We create display ads that are loud and catchy, write blogs that don’t get to the point and create feverish subject lines that scream desperation. 

Something that will always be authentic though, is the simple act of conversation stemming from genuine intrigue and curiosity. Fostering appeal through actual interest, engagement and demonstrations creates opportunities for a more natural and organic way to connect people with your wares. When we create conversations around a product and service, we’re not only promoting why a person should be interested in them, but presenting them with the value and emotion that new offerings bring to the table. 

Conversational marketing with UTM parameters

Today, this is mostly accomplished by targeted messaging and personalized communications that make use of data-driven insight and consumer behavior as a jumping off point for additional marketing activity.

Conversational marketing tools, such as chatbots and live chats, enable businesses to engage with website visitors and prospects in a proactive manner. By initiating conversations, gathering information, and qualifying leads, companies can identify potential customers and move them through the sales funnel more effectively. Customers today expect instant responses and seamless experiences from the get-go and have extremely limited patience reserves even before they perceive inconvenience.

Conversational marketing enables businesses to meet these expectations by offering real-time support, answering questions promptly, and addressing any concerns customers may have immediately. By providing these convenient and personalized experiences, businesses can not only create opportunities for conversion but enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Measuring campaign success with UTM parameters

The thing about conversational marketing, however, is that it is usually a very difficult thing to track and gauge, especially at scale. How exactly do you explain the ROI of a conversational exchange between provider and customer? Of course that is a rather simplistic scenario depicting the role and nature of conversational marketing overall, but it does illustrate the wild west aspects of organic marketing tactics - there is a lot left to the imagination and gut feeling!

As a solution to the supposed lack of tracking capabilities, we humbly suggest the inclusion of a targeted OnceHub chatbot, replete with its own UTM targeting capabilities for campaign tracking. 

What are UTM parameters?

UTMs parameters are added to the end of website URLs for advanced tracking and analytics. They are also referred to as UTM tags, UTM codes, tracking tags, or simply, UTMs. There are five standard UTM parameters that can be used. These are campaign, source, medium, term, and content.Implementing UTMs is simple, and free. It’s an affordable and effective way to monitor campaigns in your lead acceleration process.

UTMs allow you to track inbound traffic, and measure the impact of your marketing efforts. With them, you can better understand how your leads engage with the content on your website. Analyzing this data will help you to evaluate whether a campaign was successful. This allows you to identify gaps or opportunities in your lead acceleration process. You’ll be better equipped to prioritize the campaigns to focus on for your business.

Using UTM parameters with OnceHub chatbots

With OnceHub you can create smart chatbots that capture, qualify, and engage with the right leads in minutes, not days. Adding UTMs into the mix allows you to accelerate the benefits of chatbots.

Using UTM parameters with targeted chatbots you’re able to create relevant content for your website leads. You can have a smart chatbot on your website that interacts with leads who arrive through a specific campaign.

For example, send an email campaign to a select group of high-quality leads. When they click a link in the email it takes them to a page on your website. A chatbot uniquely created for these leads pops up and interacts with them. This UTM targeted chatbot won’t interfere with any of the other content and chatbots on your website.

Another option is to use UTM links with standalone chatbots to see which sources generate the most traffic, or high quality leads. 

For example, create a standalone chatbot to interact with sales referral leads. Use different UTMs to the same standalone page to monitor and analyze which sales agents bring in the most high quality leads.

You can even take your analysis a step further by exporting your OnceHub UTM activity into a spreadsheet. Exporting allows for further analysis, as well as enabling you to segment sets of leads based on UTMs associated with their activity. From the spreadsheet, you can delve deeper into the details, and create charts and tables.

In short, UTM parameters and targeted campaigns allow you to figure out what actually works and where to focus your attention to go on to continued success. Consider incorporating them into your next round of marketing activity and get a bird’s eye view of who is engaging and who needs a helping hand today by clicking here.

Track campaigns and UTM parameters in two ways

Firstly, you can track the point of conversion. This allows you to see where visitors were able to convert successfully along the touchpoints of your funnel and can provide you with a valuable indication as to what messaging or journey point is allowing for a conversion. If you’re making use of a chatbot where a meeting is the conversion point, you’ll be able to see which part of your conversational flow is yielding optimal results. This is done by targeting the audience you have created and setting parameters to identify the time they spent on your site and the page they’re presently on. 

The second tracking method you can employ is knowing where your visitors are coming from and how this information can define their journey with you onwards. By making use of this feature you’re enabling a sophisticated way of starting or continuing a conversation, tracking where they are honing in from and responding to what they’ve already seen or interacted with. This is achieved by building audiences in your targeted bot settings, where your possible parameters enable extremely intuitive recognition and identification of activities such as where your visitors are from, how many times they’ve visited your site and even what previous conversations they may have had with you. 

We firmly believe that context is everything and is the only true guiding star that is reliable and consistent when gauging success or failure with marketing activities. Knowing who you’re talking to, why you’re doing so and when to act is absolutely invaluable to establishing an output that works. Conversations remain the most natural and effective way to link people with your product or service, and having the power of tracking to guide your interactions and inform your approach is always a better approach than seeing what sticks to the wall. To get started on creating your own conversations that convert, click here.