URL tagging in social media marketing

URL tagging using UTM parameters, UTM_ID and CID in social media marketing campaigns for more accurate campaign performance data.

Social media marketing is growing at a terrific pace now, with newer channels and strategies evolving every day. There are a few things to remember before embarking on your social media journey.

Towards better Social Media Marketing

Different social media channels have different demographics and personas of audience. The type of content shared, and the tone also differs based on the audience profile of that channel.

Organizations are spending many hours and dollars to figure out social media strategies that will yield maximum returns. A good social media strategy involves a few distinct steps.

1. Create your audience personas

This is a very important exercise for any organization, since all your marketing strategies would revolve around this. Ask yourself a few crucial questions to arrive at your audience persona:

  • Is your audience primarily male or female?
  • What is the age group?
  • If they are professionals, what are their designations likely to be?
  • What are the social media channels they would frequent?
  • How long are they likely to spend on different social media channels?
  • What brand of cars would they buy?
  • What kind of vacations would they take?
  • What kind of problems would they be facing?

These seemingly weird questions will help you create an almost accurate picture of your target audience’s tastes, interests and behaviour.

You will find that you arrive at more than one segment of customers you can target. Always keep this list in mind while creating your marketing and specifically, social media strategy.

2. Choose the right channels

It’s very difficult to focus on all social media channels at the same time. You have to choose 3-4 channels to focus your marketing energies on. The audience persona that was created earlier will help figure out which channels your audience is likely to frequent.

If you do not know the answer to this question, you can also run paid marketing campaigns on multiple channels to see which one yields the best results. Here are some quick stats to help you choose the best social media channels for your business:

Social media channel Age group Time spent/day
Facebook 25-34 38 minutes
Instagram 25-34 29 minutes
YouTube 15-25 42 minutes
LinkedIn 46-55 11 minutes
Twitter 30-49 6 minutes
Pinterest 30-49 14 minutes
Tiktok 18-24 45 minutes
Snapchat 13-34 26 minutes

3. Speak the language of your audience and the channel

After choosing the social media channels, you have to start posting content on a regular basis. Make sure you understand and reflect the tone of the channel you are posting on.

  • Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp etc. have an informal, friendly vibe. Speak directly to your customer’s hearts, make sure you use the right lingo.
  • Keep it simple, informal, bright and cheerful.
  • Use a lot of imagery and videos
  • Don’t make your posts text-heavy
  • Twitter, by its very nature, requires your posts to be short. Use words frugally and efficiently, and provide links to pages with more elaborate content
  • Remember that LinkedIn is a professional network, and a more formal platform efficiently, and provide links to pages with more elaborate content
  • LinkedIn followers do like more information, but in bite-sized chunks. Long format content does work, if it’s interesting and attention-grabbing.

Feel free to try different kinds of posts to see what works best. The advantage of social media platforms is that you know what worked and what did not work almost immediately.

Keep a close watch on your post performance metrices - likes, shares, followers, subscriptions, re-tweets, comments and all those metrices that social media channels provide free of cost.

4. Build and engage with your community

Rome was not built in a day, nor will your social media community be built in a day or a few days. Keep providing unique, engaging content regularly. You can also keep testing your posting time to figure out the time when you have most engagement from your audience.

  • Respond to comments, positive or negative as early as possible, so that your audience know that you are invested into their experiences with your brand
  • Everybody likes freebies. Research into what your audience would value, and give some freebies, offers, discount vouchers, or preferential treatment for your social media audience
  • Run contests, lucky dips or surveys to encourage more audience participation
  • Use influencers to market your products or services
  • Reward the more active members of the community, so that they become your brand ambassadors.

5. Measure everything

There are a number of metrices you get very easily from the social media channels – likes, shares, followers, re-tweets, comments, interactions, impressions, views, new visitors, and so on. It’s easy to have a look at these numbers and promptly forget them.

Keep a record of them track of how these numbers are growing over time. Have a target in mind in terms of percentage increases over time, so that you work towards a number, rather than working blindly.

Add tracking codes to your websites to get more detailed information about your visitors. Facebook Pixels, LinkedIn Insights tags are examples of social media-specific code you can add to your websites.

6. URL tagging for social campaigns

Marketers have now realized the importance of tagging campaign URLs accurately to track campaign statistics better. Here’s how to tag your URLs for social media campaigns.

https://www.camptag.ai?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=branding&utm_content=bannerad&utm_term=campaigntagging

https://www.camptag.ai?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=leadgen&utm_content=textad&utm_term=campaignurls

https://www.camptag.ai?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=leadgen&utm_content=text

The primary UTM parameters are:

  • utm_source which denotes the source of traffic
  • utm_medium which denotes the channel used
  • utm_campaign which stands for the name of the campaign
  • utm_content which denotes the type of ad
  • utm_term which gives the keyword used by the visitor

In addition to these, you can have custom dimensions like Product, Category, Sub-category, Geo etc., which can help you segment your campaign statistics better.

It’s also common to include more values within one parameter to capture more information:

utm_campaign=branding_runningshoes_women_australia

UTM_ID or CID

Rather than having long, cumbersome URLs that contain multiple parameters and values, you can have utm_id for Google Analytics or cid for Adobe Analytics to summarise all parameters and values into a single ID.

https://www.camptag.ai?utm_id=3453443

https://www.camptag.ai?cid=2344543

With URLs like this, all the campaign parameters are summarized into the single ID. You also need to create import templates which map the ID to specific parameter values, and upload them to your Analytics platform so that you get accurate information on your campaign performance.

How can CampTag help with marketing taxonomy and URL tagging?

Standard marketing campaign names, or campaign taxonomy helps you analyze your campaign performance data better. CampTag’s awesome marketing taxonomy and URL builder can help you tag your social media campaign URLs accurately, without data entry errors.

Reach out to us about Camptag to get rid of messy, error-prone spreadsheets.