If you’ve ever clicked on a link from a marketing email, you might have noticed you're taken to a URL that has all kinds of words and characters appended to the end of it. While it may look like gibberish, it’s actually a set of UTM tags at work.

UTM tags, or UTM parameters as they are also known by, are code snippets that you can use to segment the traffic coming to your website or Flipbook. Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, use UTM tags to identify where a user has come from, such as a particular marketing email, advert, or partner website. Most commonly, UTM tags allow companies to understand the efficacy of their various marketing efforts.

If you think about the luggage conveyor belts at an airport, the tag on the suitcase informs baggage handlers which flight the suitcase has come from, and which belt it should be placed on. In essence, this is the same way UTM tags work in your web browser.

The digital marketplace is still growing fast, and companies today are spending more of their budgets on digital marketing than ever, across a variety of different channels. UTM tags help you to better understand what mediums (i.e., your weekly offer email, or a highly targeted banner ad) drive traffic to your business.

Generally speaking, the parameters you can track via UTM tags are:

The 3 in bold are by far the most used parameters, but both the Content and Term tags can be used to give you additional insights. What parameters you can track, and how you do so, is highly dependent on the analytics solution you use, but whatever solution you choose, should provide you with a guide on how to track UTM parameters in their interface.

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:

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:

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.

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.

UTM tags are effective for tracking incoming traffic from an external source, such as an email newsletter. However, using them to track internal traffic, can cause some confusion in your data.

For example, if you use the same analytics tracking IDs implemented across your Flipbook and website (both owned domains), this can lead to doubled sessions when UTM tags are used in internal links across these domains.

Your analytics solution creates a new session every time a new user lands on your domain. When UTM tags are used across your owned domains, your analytics software interprets this as the start of a new session, meaning your overall session count might not match how many sessions you really have.

However, most analytics solutions have the ability to track visitors across any and all domains where the same analytics tracking ID is implemented.