What is a UTM medium? How do I fill it in?
UTM links are the most effective way to measure your marketing efforts. Leveraging your analytics and UTM links, you can easily see which type of traffic is converting more than other types.
If you do not know what a UTM is, please check out this article on “What is a UTM.”
When creating a UTM link, you need to fill in multiple fields to better define where the link was placed and what is driving the traffic. The Campaign Medium is used to identify the delivery method that was used to show the link to the end user. In the UTM.io builder (Chrome extension or web dashboard), it is just called “Medium.”
If you know your UTM Medium, you can fill it in with your other UTM fields and then generate the UTM link in a matter of seconds.
If you’re not sure what to write in the UTM Medium field, you’ll want to think of the delivery method for your link. For example, if I shared a link using my email list in MailChimp, I would set the medium as “email.” This is because the email was the delivery method that was used to send the link to the user.
As another example, if you shared a link on Facebook, you might choose the word “post” as the Medium because a post was the delivery method.
There are lots of examples of Mediums. Just remember that the Medium is the delivery method for the link (like a post or email). Be careful not to confuse Medium with Source. The Campaign Source refers to the platform or location where the link is shown. In the example above, the Medium is “post,” but the source would be “Facebook,” since that was the location/source of the link. Using Campaign Mediums correctly will allow you to evaluate multiple channels against each other. For example, you could compare the emails you send from three or four different services.
At UTM.io, we send emails to our users from Mixpanel, Autopilot, Mandrill, and Mixmax. In each of these cases, we write the Medium as “email” because that is how we send the message/link to the user.
Since we use our templates diligently and our team always uses the same Medium, we can see how these different email channels behave. We simply go to our analytics tool and look for the “email” Medium, and we can see how this Medium performs. If you have advanced tools, you can break these down into groupings to see how different Sources, Campaigns, Content, or Terms are working.
If you still have questions about how to set your UTMs, you can start by reading our “What is a UTM guide.”
If you need help deciding on your Campaign Medium, just send some of the details to [email protected]. We would love to recommend some best practices.