Run outreach and events
Add UTM parameters to campaign links
Tag the links you share in newsletters, posts, and ads with UTM parameters so your website analytics can tell you which efforts actually sent people to the book page.
Authors often hire help with this: website or technical.
Why it matters
Without tagging, all visitors from email, social, and ads look the same in analytics, and you cannot tell whether the newsletter or the paid post did the work. With it, the next campaign can put effort where the last one showed results. It is a small habit with a long payoff, and it costs nothing.
Your part
- What you do
- Do it. You normally do this yourself.
- Who normally owns it
- Author and Website specialist. Whoever builds the campaign links: author, publisher marketer, or webmaster
- When
- Before each campaign launches, starting with the first announcement (Run outreach and events: three months before publication through the first months after)
How to do it
The full walkthrough
UTM parameters (the initials stand for Urchin Tracking Module, a name inherited from an early analytics product) are short tags added to the end of a web address that identify where a visitor came from: the source (a newsletter, a social platform), the medium (email, social, paid), and the campaign (launch week, paperback release). When someone clicks a tagged link, your site's analytics records the tags, and you can see which channels sent visitors to the book page.
The tags only work on links to a site whose analytics you can see, which in practice means your own website. Retailer links cannot be tagged usefully, because you do not see the retailer's analytics. The pattern, then, is to send campaign traffic to your book page, tagged, and let the book page send people on to retailers.
Traditionally published authors are unlikely to get analytics from the publisher's site, so this applies to their own. Hybrid and self-published authors, who often run their own newsletters and ads, get the most from it.
This is worth considering, not essential. If you do not look at analytics, do not bother. If you do, a consistent tagging scheme (decided once, written down, applied to every campaign link) turns a vague sense of what worked into a number.
Common mistakes
- Tagging retailer links, where you will never see the result.
- Using different spellings for the same source, so the reports split one channel into five.
- Tagging links you share in casual conversation, which makes them look like spam.
- Setting it all up and never opening the analytics.
What done looks like
- A written tagging convention: what values you use for source, medium, and campaign, in lowercase, with no spaces.
- Every campaign link to your own site tagged before it goes into a newsletter, post, or ad.
- A link-building tool or spreadsheet that generates the tagged links so they are consistent.
- Campaign traffic sent to the book page on your site, which then links to retailers.
- A look at the analytics after each campaign, with a note of what you learned.
Sources and last checked
- Official source
- No single official page for this step.
- Last checked
- Not checked against its source yet.
- How confident we are
- Verified