📖 This guide explains:
What are UTM tags?
UTM tags, or UTM parameters, are code snippets that help segment traffic to your website or Flipbook. Analytics tools like Google Analytics use them to track where users come from—such as a marketing email, ad, or partner site. Essentially, they help companies measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
Think of UTM tags like luggage tags at an airport—they tell baggage handlers which flight a suitcase came from and where it should go. Similarly, UTM tags help identify the source of web traffic.
What can you track with UTM tags?
With UTM tags, you can track the following parameters:
Medium
Source
Campaign
Content
Term
The most commonly used are Medium, Source, and Campaign, but Content and Term can provide additional insights. How you track these parameters depends on your analytics solution, which should offer a guide on tracking UTM tags in their interface.
💡 Try this UTM builder is a great tool that helps you correctly generate links with UTM tags.
When, and how to implement UTM tags in your Flipbook
Ensure UTM parameters are picked up in Flipbooks
Ensure UTM parameters are picked up in Flipbooks
To track visitor journeys, and UTM parameters inside your Flipbook, you’ll need to make sure you have an analytics solution implemented in your Flipbook. Not doing so will mean that you won’t be able to track which source or medium your visitors have come from, to access your Flipbook.
If you haven’t done so already, take the time now to get analytics set up in your Flipbook. We’ve got guides that can help you get set up with Google, and Adobe Analytics:
Track traffic coming into your Flipbook
Track traffic coming into your Flipbook
Understanding where your Flipbook traffic is coming from is vital to optimizing your visitor journey. UTM tags can even give you insight into how large a share of traffic each of your channels contributes to your overall Flipbook traffic. To achieve this, you’ll need to tag all the external links that point to your Flipbook with UTM tags.
For example, if you have links that point to your Flipbook in your email newsletter, you might want to use UTM tags in these links to help you understand how many referrals to your Flipbook these links have made.
An example link would look like:
https://catalog.yourcompany.com/august2023?utm_campaign=summersale&utm_source=email
This would allow your analytics software to parse that visitors using this link have been referred by an email, specifically one highlighting a campaign for your summer sale.
Tracking outgoing traffic from your Flipbook
Tracking outgoing traffic from your Flipbook
If you are more interested in tracking traffic from your Flipbook to other parts of your digital business, you don’t necessarily need to have analytics implemented on your Flipbook (although it’s always a good idea!).
In this case, you’ll need to make sure that all links inside your Flipbook contain UTM tags, that will be tracked when your Flipbook visitors.
Considerations when using UTM tags
UTM tags are great for tracking external traffic, like from an email newsletter, but using them for internal traffic can skew your data.
For instance, if you use the same analytics tracking IDs across your Flipbook and website (both owned domains), it can result in duplicated sessions when UTM tags are used in internal links between them. Your analytics software may interpret UTM-tagged internal links as new sessions, causing your session count to be inflated. However, most analytics solutions can track visitors across multiple domains with the same tracking ID to avoid this issue.