For this post, we’ll assume that you have some level of familiarity with UTMs and their purpose. We’ll cover the basics of how to create them for common ad platforms like LinkedIn, Demandbase, Twitter and Facebook. Then we’ll show you how to pass those UTMs into Mutiny to create personalizations based on those ads that would be difficult to achieve otherwise.

So, let’s take as our example a fictional campaign for ABC Corp’s new Widget 2.0.

To support this campaign, you’re running persona focused ads. In this case, you’re targeting CWOs, Chief Widget Officers. This is a great data source to use for landing page personalization once your ad has been clicked. But you’ll need to do a little set up.

First you’ll want to build your UTMs. The easiest way is probably to use a tool like Google’s URL Builder. Below is a screenshot of the setup for our campaign.

Now, for a quick run-down of what you see.

The URL is, of course, your website where all the content your ad is linking to lives, and where  you’ll be tracking and analyzing traffic.

The campaign source is the platform where we’ve published our ad or asset. In this case, it’s LinkedIn, but you could easily replace this field with Facebook, Demandbase, or Twitter.

The medium is the type of channel that’s driving the traffic––organic social, paid social, e-mail and so on.

The campaign name differentiates this from your other efforts, like for example ABC’s Thing-a-Majig 3.0.

Content allows you to track different ads within a campaign-–in this case it’s an ad that touts ABC’s widget as the world’s fastest.

You’ll notice we left Term blank since we aren’t tracking any paid keywords. But a quick note: Terms are also powerful data sources for personalization because you can group them into themes like ‘price’, ‘social proof’, ‘competitors’ and so on. Then you can create personalized pages based on those themes. We’ll cover this more in depth in a future post.

To continue with our Widget 2.0 campaign example––UTMs are case sensitive, so we’ve respected the convention of making all of our tags lowercase to avoid future confusion. For organic posts or anywhere your URL will be visible, you’ll want to use a tool like the URL shortener included in Google’s URL builder.

Without shortening, our final link looks like this, with all of our parameters coming without spaces after the question mark:

www.abccorp.com?utm_source=linkedIn&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=widget2_launch&utmcontent=worlds_fastest_widget

Now that we’ve got that all sorted, look again at the Campaign Name field. You’ll see it reads “widget2_launch_cwo”. That’s because, as we mentioned earlier, we’ve created targeting settings in our paid LinkedIn campaign for CWOs, Chief Widget Officers.

Now inside Mutiny when you define your segment, you can select the relevant UTM parameters (campaign name) to achieve a unique, full-site personalization. In this case, you’d be personalizing by role since your campaign was targeting widget executive leadership.

And here’s a tip: Remember to carry through the messaging from your ad to your personalized pages. This will create a cohesive experience, and add depth to the messaging that drove the click in the first place. So if you’re targeting a new prospect and you created an ad that introduces your value prop, you would match this content on the landing page. Likewise, if your ads were created for leads already in your pipeline, the ads might focus on things that accelerate the sales process, like social proof, ROI or competitor comparison. Again, the content on your landing page should reflect this.

As we’ve seen, by getting creative with what UTMs you pass into Mutiny from targeted campaigns on external platforms, you can achieve even more granular or specialized personalization.