Hello and welcome to the latest installment of Creator Tips and Tricks! Today we'll be following up on our last article all about identifying your audience, with a way to track the traffic with the links you send out to your prospective audience via UTM links. But what is a UTM?

UTMs are a small section of code that you can add onto the ends of your links and track the performance. Specifically, UTM stands for Urchin Traffic Monitor, which comes from the software Urchin Tracker. This particular software was designed to work as the base for Google Analytics. It’s the perfect tool for tracking how many people click on the links to your comics and finding out how they engage with your comic once they get there.

UTM data will appear in your GlobalComix Analytics and can tell you information like:

• The Medium readers came from, things like email, system, a referral, or social media.
• The Source, specifically, what platform or site the traffic came from.
• Campaign, or marketing campaign (what group of terms they came from).
• A term will also be available, and is a way to sort out which link is which. Usually the term is a special keyword or set of data to make it stand out from the other UTMs you’ve used in the same campaign.
• How many unique readers read your comic from each link.
• How many pages were read as a whole from each link

Combined with the timeframe tools GlobalComix has available, you can track your UTM link performance over time. Now that we know the basics of what makes a UTM, lets see how these are helpful to us! GlobalComix already makes use of these 4 data points, Medium, Source, Campaign and Term. I've been using UTMs in my own promotion for a while now, so I'll show you some examples from my own marketing campaigns too!

Here you can see some analytics for my Godsbane manga for the last 30 days. I've been using UTMs with my own marketing strategy for quite some time now, just about a year, so I've had some time to experiment. If we look at line items 3, 4, and 9, we have 3 UTMs that I've used specifically for my Reddit promotions. These are my top 9 for the last month, interesting they all come from the same subreddit!

In creating UTMs, you’ll need 5 parts, your original link, and you’ll also need to input the medium, the source, the campaign, and the term which we described earlier. Let’s go over how I have used them here as some examples for you.

Medium:
Looking at my examples, all of my medium inputs were “social”. Since I was sharing them on social media, this is correct. If I had been sharing them in an email, like a newsletter, I could have used "email". This is great so that you can identify which readers come from your social media posts vs emails, versus ads or any other types of referrals you might use.

Source:
I posted these to Reddit, so the source was input as “reddit”. If you were to put a UTM on Twitter, you’d input “twitter”, and so on. Social media is tough, and all of us creators like to zero in on what we think will work best for us. This is one way you can narrow down to what traffic source is working best and which need more attention/work or are just plain not worth more of your time.

Campaign:
I personally use the subreddit that I am posting on in the Campaign. This helps organize all of my reddit campaigns by subreddit, making them easy to sort by when using Google Analytics in combination with UTMS. That's right! All of this can work with Google Analytics as well! I'll show you more about that later. In this particular case, all of the reddit links went to r/mangamakers, it's one of my favorite places to post my manga and the people there are awesome! If I was posting in saw r/clipstudio, the Campaign would be listed as r-clipstudio.

Term:
Because I don’t always share the first page as my URL, it’s beneficial to mark which page you are sharing AND the date to help you identify which link is which. Sometimes, I will post a new page I've finished instead of the first one. Doing so helps me find if Reddit liked one particular page. This way I can use this page in future campaigns or promotional art later down the line. By using the date (in this case November 14th and November 17th), it also helps narrow down which specific link is clicked on.

I've further sorted it out by adding "reply" onto some terms. This is important for me to identify which links were put in posts I made that are NOT comments/replies. This matters as a reply insinuates to me that someone ASKED for a link or about the manga. If I see a subreddit appearing more often in my UTMs with lots of "reply" terms, I need to pay more attention to that subreddit or think about posting there on my own!
 

If you'd like a deeper look into how each of these individual parts work for analytics, we've got a video for you here:

Now that we’ve seen some examples of how UTMs work and how to look at them in your analytics, let’s practice making them for our own comics. Our own Eric Tapper has created a public document to help auto-generate these UTMs for you. You can find this public sheet here.

When you open this document, we have a series of instructions on the first tab if you ever forget how this works. Always feel free to reach out us as well. This document will help you in posting to both Reddit and Twitter, but first lets focus on making basic UTMs first.

To use this sheet, first we’ll need to make a copy for our own use. From there you can follow along with Eric Tapper in the video below, as he walks you through how to use it far better than I could! Thank you, Eric!

We hope this sheet will prove helpful to you in beginning your marketing journey! The way you organize your campaigns and terms is up to you, but we’ve offered some advice on how to best organize these to make it easier for you to identify links.

What about Google Analytics? How does that tie into GlobalComix?
 

If you go to your Creator Settings and look at the "Identity" page, you'll find a place for your Google Analytics Tracking ID. IF you already have one set up, you can import that ID here and you'll be able to track the UTMs and GlobalComix Analytics in your Google Analytics too!

You'll be able to get even more data that way! I'm not going to go into depth into how this works, but I did provide some resources below. It's incredibly valuable information if you take the time to dig into it.

With that, we've finished our tutorial about UTMs, what they are and how to use them. Remember this is the third installment of the Self-Promotion and Marketing series!

• If you missed the last article about finding your audience, you can find it here.
• If you want to start from the beginning, you can find that here!
• You can also find all of our education series here.

Our next entry will be in January to make room for all the cool December articles we have planned for you all! Speaking of next article, it's the last of the Self-Promotion series and will cover an in-depth look at reading and interpreting GlobalComix analytics. This way we can analyze how our UTMs are performing as well as the actual comic itself. There's a lot of hidden data and patterns I've been able to uncover and I'm excited to share it with you all!

Reference:

•  How to Know Where your Readers are Coming From by GlobalComix on YouTube

• Walkthrough: GlobalComix Community Marketing Toolkit by GlobalComix on YouTube

• UTM Tracking by Agency Analytics
• Collect campaign data with custom URLs by Google Analytics