[Music] Hello there and welcome to Fulfillment.com ecommerce education vlog. My name is AJ Yeager with Praxismetrics.com and I'm going to be your host today. So over the next five minutes I want to  go over what is I believe is to be the number one  mistake that 90 percent of e-commerce  brands are making when they're tracking  their revenue online. I've worked with a lot of brands uh in  the world  over 150 different brands in e-commerce  and their data so I'm coming from a lot of experience here and this continues to come up like 99% of the time. So marketing without data is  like driving with your eyes closed I  hope you agree with me on that  we can't steer the ship if we don't  know our numbers so today I'm going to  go over three things. One is the actual biggest mistake when it comes to tracking e-commerce data . Number two is exactly what utms are and  how they can take your marketing data to  the next level  and how to build a utm link in the most  effective way so you can utilize them in  your business. So one of the biggest mistakes is  assuming that everything is tracking in  your business. Okay what I mean is that all these different applications you're using um are are not tracking exactly what you may need and I mean that by out-of-the-box software limitations. Some of the apps like Shopify what you may be using  are yes tracking certain things  automatically but there are other  softwares out there that are not  tracking the fields that you need  ultimately to answer your business  questions the technology is just not set  up properly. SOPs may not have been followed by your team when setting these up  and getting all the extra custom values filled out and also some of these platforms are lacking uids which are unique identifiers. Email's a  big one, address, phone number you know exact name we need  something to make sure  we tell the whole story of the data and  many of these don't don't tie it together and they don't  work together. Google analytics I mean I  know  many of you probably use it, some of you  may hate it, some of you may love it but it is one of the best free tools out there. It does not come set up the right way, putting code on your website does not  handle everything you need most people  think it's set it and forget it meaning  they they  set it, they install it and they're like oh good i don't have to deal with it. I feel like they never have to  log in there now. I don't recommend  logging in there because it's not  actually a really good dashboard unless  you are trained to use it it does not  work the way  that you want to especially for business  owners and marketing teams it's too  complicated. Now this is all about ROI  I want to make  sure that you can get  ROI  out of this training and what you're  going to, what I'm going to teach you. Now the number one mistake is not properly using organized utms for all of your marketing  efforts online. Okay we've got to be able to prove ROI from all the different channels we're using  and that is super important and this is very very um  detailed and I think many companies get lazy and or don't follow a certain structure. UTMs stand for urchin tracking mechan or module uh I won't go into the history but it's a very simple term, it's a free link that you can create all it is is a parameter it is a encoded  suffix that you append and add to your  url  and it can be quite long and made up of  various various parameters  but basically it's providing very  specific information about where that  link  is coming from and by stringing these  parameters together  you're able to track online marketing  campaigns with a tremendous amount of  detail  and granularity. So uh this is it may seem simple uh you might have heard  about these before but it is literally one of the most powerful ways to track  your marketing  sales and any activity you're doing  online and I highly recommend you listen to this so here's an example my buddy justin  goff is doing a promotion for us  he sent out an email to his list and if  they click  there or where the other red arrow is it  would be  the link was actually this one now it's  long it's ugly but here's what it means  it tells us six different things one the  url  two the source three the medium  for the campaign name five the content  and then last not least the term  now i'm going to break these down for  you real quick url is very simple that's  where you're driving them to usually  going to be your e-commerce  domain campaign source this is where the  clicks are coming from is it a search  engine  is it another specific site is it from  maybe even a newsletter that was sent  out for you  this could be a lot of different things  campaign medium is how the link was  presented to them  uh search end results pay-per-click ad  email  affiliate link whatever that may be this  is a very important part  social media you there's a lot of  different um  ways that you can add in medium but uh  it's really different for each business  campaign name here let me move my my  video up here campaign name is the  marketing campaign that the link belongs  to  traditionally this is done in succession  of campaigns like a black friday  sale campaign content is the specific  part of a marketing campaign  that got them to take action this is  very optional you don't have to use it  but it's good for testing sometimes  ad copy a b split test between emails or  other things campaign term the keyword  used in paper click advertisements that  generate the click  and the substance subsequent visitor or  what specific words were clicked in an  email  this is again optional you can make this  whatever you want to i'll show you how i  did it  next is uh so so basically ours was the  one above is is was justin goff so we  know who it was  he was an affiliate the campaign that he  was specifically sending out that week  and again that was justin goff email  that way we just made sure but this is  very simple because we know the  affiliate and we know what relationship  it is and how he sent it out  now there are different ones he sent and  the campaign term we changed later  to include email one email two email  three email four et cetera  so um the website url is simply the  website we're tracking right  the campaign source examples for you for  to use in the future  are google facebook twitter the  affiliate or affiliate name  being adroll etc you can you can change  that however you want to so these are  examples for source  here's some examples for medium cpc you  know  cost per click email um social post  affiliate referral and you're going to  come up with your own structure i don't  have time to go through all that today  but this is just some quick examples  campaign summer sales social and then  the date  up the specific name of the product or a  promo code  uh also content email subject lines  controller  variation content a content b  for term multiple links inside of an  email different actual number of links  you can put  link number one link number two actual  keywords or other further  things that you could use to describe  what you're doing that marketing  activity  so when you should not use utms let me  move my face again this is not using  what you should not do  never put a utm tag or a campaign  variable on an  internal link you're not doing this on  your website this is all external  outside driving to you  do not use utms when creating internal  links on your own internal website i  just said that  if you start using utms to link to  various parts of your website  you can artificially multiply session  counts this means that you're going to  double up or triple up the traffic  coming through google analytics and you  do not want to corrupt any of your data  we do not want bad data  so to wrap up and give you a few action  steps  the only way you can know the true roi  of your online marketing activities is  by using utms on every single specific  online activity you're doing  it doesn't cost anything it doesn't  matter uh just  it's just a matter of taking the time to  do it so there is a cost internally to  pay somebody to do this but it is so  worth it and you're going to have to  make mistakes along the way  and figure out a system that works for  your company there is a way to go ahead  and  use these you can use track funnels.com  or you can just go create these inside  of google's tool  by itself sit down with your team and  map out  your hierarchy have a whiteboarding  session to get very clear on each of  those six  different uh parameters how you're going  to use it in the future with your  marketing channels  determine a way to stay organized keep  it in a spreadsheet or use something  like trackfunnels.com that we created  for free  or choose one campaign i want you to  just choose one campaign  right now and begin immediately okay  utms can take your marketing to a whole  new level all the channels analytics  tools out there work with utms for the  most part 95 90  of them will pass utms through um and  you can use  utms to have better data in your all of  your marketing campaigns  and you can use this data to track  return on investment for anything and  everything you're doing  i hope you enjoyed today's video if you  have any questions go ahead and let me  know  and i'll go ahead and answer anything in  the comments thank you so much  you

AJ Yager
 / 
Praxis Metrics
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