Add UTM tags to your Google Business Profile Website Links
“Adding UTM Tags enable us to attribute an RoI value to the URLs in Google Business Profile.”
As a PPC Digital Marketer, it is important to track all your Call to Actions as much as possible.
This article shares the rationale behind tagging all your Google Business Profile landing page URL links in order to measure and analyze results in Google Analytics.
What are UTM tags?
Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes are snippets of text added to the end of a URL to help track where the website traffic (and the subsequent conversion) comes from when users click a link to the URL.
What are the benefits of adding UTM tags to the GBP website links?
The Google Business Profile offers a plenty of opportunities to link to the website. Apart from the direct website link, users can be directed to the website through the restaurant menu or book an appointment link, etc.
Without the UTM tagging, it is hard to tell the difference between the traffic that ends up on the website through organic results and the local 3-pack.
All of these are simply classified under the “organic” bucket in Google Analytics.
Also some of the mobile apps in many browsers strip out any referral information from Google Analytics and they land in the “direct” bucket which prevents us from getting to know the original traffic source.
UTM tags serve as a panacea here and reveals which part of Google Business Profile (GBP) drives traffic and conversion.
With the growing significance of GBP in driving conversions, this additional piece of information enables us to attribute an RoI value to the URLs in GBP.
Watch the video by Claire Carlile on this topic.
How to do this?
Let me try to keep it simple!
The UTM Tags are composed of Source, Medium & Campaign tracking components (among others).
While tagging, the use of the following parameters would help in attributing your source of traffic to Google Business Profile.
Source: Google
Medium: Organic
Campaign: gbp-post or gbp-call or gbp-appt based on whatever you wish to tag.
GA Dev Tools’s Campaign URL builder helps build your UTM tag easily.
Courtesy: Claire Carlile’s video on this subject.
