Training Tuesdays

All right. What's up everybody? Dante here. Glad to be with you guys for another amazing Training Tuesday. I'm excited for this one. Been excited for this one all weekend. Last week, Aaron and I showed you how to build a LinkedIn bio funnel, an unbelievably powerful and simple funnel for our creators, our experts, our YouTubers. Uh, this week we're going to build it a little bit more. We teased about it talking about UTMs. Now you have a tool, you have a resource, you have an asset, this thing that you can start sharing on socials to generate leads and trials and sales and start owning your traffic. But how do we know what's working best? How do I know where my efforts are the most fruitful and where I should focus more on and what I should do less of? How do we make an actual data-driven decision? Now that we're putting links out there everywhere and having traffic going to our funnels from all over the place. Well, with me to help break it down is my good friend Matthew King. Good to have you here today, Matt.

What's going on, man?

We're living the dream. Excited to talk some UTMs, and you know all things UTMs, so break it down for me. What are UTMs? How do we use them? What are their purposes?

Yeah, so UTMs is just a, uh, it's like a very common way to track traffic sources. It's been around for a while. It sounds— when you hear about it, you're like, oh my gosh, what's a UTM? What's a tracking parameter? How do I do that? What's a URL parameter, right? Like, what did that— what is that? Where did it come from? It can sound a little bit daunting, a little bit scary, but what our goal today is to kind of break it down and make it seem a little bit simpler, a little bit more user-friendly, if you will, so that you guys can track your traffic sources and see what's getting, you know, see where it's coming from because if you don't know, if you just start throwing a regular link out there, you know, a lot of people have blogs, they have YouTube channels, they have their socials, they've got ads running in multiple different places. There could be banner ads. If you just throw the same link out on every one of those and then you go back and you go, hey, look, this is cool, I've got some traffic, I'm getting all these page hits, I'm getting some sales, I'm getting all this stuff going on in this one funnel. You are not going to know where you're, you're gonna— well, that's cool, but I don't know where it came from. You're not going to understand which traffic source is the one treating you well. You're not going to know which one, which ones to get rid of and which ones to keep. So if, if you're spending— I mean, if they're— if you're not going to know where to focus your time. So if YouTube's not giving you what you thought it was, but blogging is, then you're going to want to focus your time there. If Facebook ads is giving you the attention that you need, but Google ads or that banner ad over in, you know, some dude's funnel is not, then you know to focus your, your, your efforts on, uh, whatever it is where the traffic is coming from. So UTM parameter— sorry, UTM parameters and UTM tracking is what's going to get you that, uh, is what's going to get you that data. So, uh, like Like Dante said here, we're gonna go into that. We're gonna dive straight in and see, uh, kind of where you can do that. So I've painted that picture for you. You see what— you see why, and you understand why you need to use that. But where are you going to do that? How are you going to set that up? How hard is this really? So what I'm going to do is, uh, figure out how to share a page, and then I'm going to bring up, uh, a URL builder. There's a couple different ways to do this, but, uh, you— one, you could just do it manually, but it's probably easier with the tools that are out there to do it the way that I'm going to show you. So give me like 2 seconds to figure out how to share.

And Matt, if you want, I can probably share my screen and we can just use the link in bio funnel that we built with everybody last week.

Yeah, if you, if you want to do it that way, would you like to take— kind of take the reins from that angle and let me Let me see here.

I think I can just share all of this, and I could have shared ahead of time.

That's what I could have done.

Let's see this. Are you seeing my ClickFunnels account now?

Uh, yes, yes, I am.

And it looks okay. Okay, great. Yep, it did the right screen. Okay, cool. So here we go, gang. Like Matt was saying earlier, we have a URL. Here's my link in bio funnel. I can either share the URL of this specific page by clicking here, or I can share my funnel URL. We have good funnel habits here because we know what we're doing. So we're just gonna ch— grab the funnel URL itself. But if I go and share this on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, some Reddit posts, and I have some banner ads running out there, or some Facebook ads all pushing to this, I can't tell what worked best. I don't know what thing— I can see sales, I can see traffic, I can see movement, but where did it come from? And which of my marketing efforts are giving me the most output right now? Is it my banner ads, my Facebook ads? Was it my TikTok? Was it my Facebook Reel, my YouTube Short? I can't tell because across all of my different platforms, I just shared the URL. So creating these UTMs allows us to create specific URLs for the specific places that we're sharing. So let's get into it. I'm just gonna open up a new tab and I'm gonna type in Google UTM builder. And here it is, the GA DevTools. This is how we have done it forever, gang. At the end of the day, we're gonna show you some other ways in ClickFunnels to do this, but this is how UTMs have been made for the past decade and even longer. So we're just gonna do this simple way. Let's go to our campaign URL builder. Here's the URL up top, just ga-dev-tools.google/campaign-url-builder. All right, so once we come here, I'm gonna have to enter my website URL. So bingo, I now posted, here is my funnel URL. Comma chaser.com/change this. And here we go, comma chaser.com/change this. Now I have my campaign ID. You'll see that there is not a star right here next to my ID where on my source there is a star. So campaign IDs are not necessary if you don't want to use them, but our source is, and the source is gonna be like, where are we doing the thing on? Let's say for this, it's Facebook. Now the medium, what type of campaign is this? Is it a DM or is it an ad? This is an ad. Let's give the campaign a name and we'll call it link in bio. That's it. So when we make a UTM, what we're doing is we're taking our root URL, our, our, our actual URL itself. and we're adding some extra parameters to the end of it. So when you put these things in inside of your Google Tag Manager, now it gives us a brand new URL. Here is the root that I put in, comma chaser.com/change this. But then we start seeing question mark UTM source equals question mark UTM medium equals. Now that you're seeing this gang, I'd like you to really pay attention as you're out in the world being a customer. Go click on some Facebook ads that are kind of interesting to you. Go look at the URLs that they take you to when you click on those Facebook ads. You will always be taken to a, a URL that has a UTM of some sort in it, or you'll be taken to a different specific URL. And it's the same thing. It's a trackable and measurable link. So I wanna share a post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest. I'm gonna start sharing everywhere. For each platform I'm gonna share on, I'm gonna make a UTM for that. So here's my Facebook. You can see I put Facebook in the source and then my UTM source equals Facebook. In my medium, I put ad. My UTM medium equals ad, right? I now— this is its own URL. I can take this URL and if I put it in a new browser, nothing crazy happens. It still takes me just to my link in bio funnel. It takes me right to the same place. Nothing changes. Nothing really happens. But now this URL is trackable and measurable. Okay. So here we go. I made a Facebook ad. I'm gonna post that to Facebook and then I'm gonna go in here and for my Instagram, I'm gonna type Instagram. Check it out. My source right down here just changed to Instagram. This is now a completely new and unique URL that you share to Instagram. Same thing. We're gonna change it out. Now my source is Pinterest and you can see in the URL, my source got changed to Pinterest. Again, a completely new unique URL. So that's how we make the UTM. But how do we understand the data? Right now I'm sending a bunch of people here. How do I break it down by the UTM? How do I break this down by— okay, well, who came from Facebook? Who came from Instagram? Who came from TikTok? Who came from Yahoo News, right? Who came from where? How do I find that? All we have to do is go to our stats of this funnel itself. Go to the stats of the funnel that you sent the traffic to. Once we're here in the stats, top right, we have a little funnel icon, and this is actually for UTM filtering. Over here, we made a UTM. Oops, sorry. It's easier if I do it down here. Over here, we made a UTM. Now in our funnel, we can start filtering by UTMs. So to start, you can filter by the first visit or last visit, you know, and this is really great. You might want to see the first time somebody is coming to your page, or maybe you're targeting your list. Maybe you're targeting people who are already on your list and have visited this page multiple times. Well, then we can target their last visit, their most recent visit to the page itself. This is actually, it gets overlooked, the capabilities you have by first and last visit, but it really allows you to see everything that you need. So we're going to go with first visit for here. Now my UTM source is, I'm going to hop over here and I can see, oh, my source right here. I made this Facebook. So let's go over here into our source. I'm gonna say Facebook. Now that's technically all I need. You can see there's no stars on any of these UTM parameters. So technically speaking, all I would need is a UTM source. I can apply that. And now guess what? The stats that it is showing me are only people that came to this funnel through the URL that has a UTM of Facebook. Does that make sense, Matt?

Yeah, to me that makes perfect sense. I mean, if you want to filter down a little further, you could fill in more of those spaces, but, um, that will get— that will tell you exactly where your source traffic is coming from.

It's exactly right. Like right here we have our campaign name is Link in Bio. So if I want, I have my UTM campaign, I can hop down here and I can put in that campaign name. And now we can get really, really, really granular, right? Because you might have 100 Facebook ads going on and then you wanna see, well, which campaign specifically is sending the best. With UTMs, we can get so, so granular. And again, I don't need you to be an expert at this right now. I'm not trying to give you any homework. When you make your UTM, just put the source, the medium, and the name. That is all you need to start, and you'll be able to decipher all of the data that you have just in that. Later in the future, if you want to use terms and contents and IDs, we can get even more granular. But I promise you, to get started, you just need the source, the medium, and the name. So now check this out, gang. My UTM source is on Facebook, so I'm gonna apply this. And I'm only filtering— let's say 100 people came to this funnel. Because I'm UTM filtering, we are only going to show the people who came in through URL where the UTM source was Facebook. So out of 100 people, 1 of them meets the criteria. That means 1 of them came from Facebook. Let's switch this up a little bit. Let's go in here and let's make this Pinterest. And let's just remove this. Let's go ahead and apply. Check out my stats. Whoa, my uniques just went to zero. Now nobody is showing. It shows me nobody came to the funnel. And that would mean that the post I put on Pinterest or the link I put on Pinterest, nobody actually clicked on that. Because I made a UTM for Pinterest. I made a new one for Facebook, a new one for Instagram, a new one for Yahoo. So when I filter by that UTM, if I don't see traffic, then I know, wow, of the 100 people who came to my funnel, none of them came from Pinterest. My efforts on Pinterest were not rewarded that well. I can actually start to make a data-driven decision now. The reason that somebody showed up when I had Facebook was, I don't think you noticed it earlier. I did it really fast and I didn't show what I was doing. I took this URL and I put it in a new browser tab. I opened up a new browser tab, I pasted it in and I pressed enter. So I visited my funnel with this UTM. Where the UTM source was Facebook. I visited this funnel, I did the thing on the funnel. So when I came back to my funnel and I filtered by Pinterest, well, I did not just visit the Pinterest URL, I visited the Facebook URL. So when we come back in here and we filter in our source, because in my UTM I make the source. I made for Facebook, I made the source Facebook. For Instagram, I made the source Instagram. For TikTok, I made the source TikTok. New URLs that I share on those platforms. So I visited the one that has a source of Facebook. So when I come down here and I change the source to Facebook and I apply that filter, you're gonna see my uniques go to 1 now. Ah, because I visited that URL. If I come back here and I make my UTM TikTok, nobody visited that UTM. But check it out. If I go over here and I make my source TikTok and I make that new URL, which there is my UTM source equals TikTok. I'm gonna copy this. I'm gonna put it in a new browser. I'm gonna now visit my funnel from my UTM of TikTok. There it is. I visited on the source equals TikTok. So I just did the thing, hop back to my funnel. Let's look at our UTM filtering. We're filtering on the source now of TikTok. My uniques were zero, but because I just visited that page and I just looked at the UTM of TikTok, Oh, of course it's not going to record me as unique because I'm doing all this in the same window. Anyway, it would show a customer because the customer visited TikTok and then you would see that there's a 1 there. Let's try it again really quick. See, yeah, it's not going to do it. I'm in the same browser.

It could be slightly delayed as well.

So it could, it could be delayed, but it's just because I'm using the same things here. So that's it, gang. UTMs, really, really simple. Once we start doing them, the first time I looked at UTMs, I was like, oh man, this seems really complicated. If you are saying that to yourself right now, I need to caution you. First time I looked at this, I allowed myself to tell myself the story. I allowed my brain to spin up a narrative that it was very complicated. And then I got nervous. And then I started looking at this screen. It was like, oh, I don't even know what I'm looking at. And it got worse and worse and worse and worse. We need to just change the way that we think. Our brains are no different than AI. The inputs that we give our brains completely determine the outputs that it will give us. Please, if you're sitting here right now saying, this is hard, this is confusing, I'm not smart enough for this, I need to stop you. You are. Trust me, if I could learn what UTMs are, me, a technologically incompetent human being who couldn't even save browser bookmarks, gang, I'm not kidding. If I clicked this star right here and saved a bookmark, I didn't know how to find it. I was technologically incompetent. And I was able to learn about UTMs. I promise, if you're sitting here right now saying, I don't know this, I can't learn this, it's too hard, I need to challenge your way of thinking, and I hope you will challenge your way of thinking as well. You can learn this, you can do this. It is not difficult, and we can make data-driven decisions now. We can understand and interpret our data, and that's one of the biggest needle movers you can do as a business. You wanna look at what kind of work can I do that's high leverage work that actually helps me grow and build and scale my business. This understanding your data is massive leverage work. So here's the deal though, gang. We made these UTMs. Great. I can track my, my traffic. I can measure my traffic, but Dante, that's kind of a gross URL. You made this whole URL and I've heard you say so many times before, Dante, My URL should be sexy. It should be something sexy and on par with what I'm talking about. And you're right, we don't need to share a whole gigantic URL like this, which has a bunch of question marks and all this stuff in there that a customer doesn't know what any of this means. We don't want to show that to customers because we're actually allowing an opportunity for confusion to enter the equation. And if confusion enters into the equation, well, a confused mind always says what? What?

Hmm.

A confused, a confused mind says no every single time without fail. A confused mind will never say yes. So one of the chief goals of you as a marketer is to make sure to remove confusion from the equation. So in order to remove confusion from the equation and to just keep this sexy and clean and on par, we would take this URL. And make it short. For years and years, what we've done for this is— come here— Bitly, bit.ly. Uh, did you have something, Matthew?

Nope, just saying, yep, that has been around for ages. I've used it myself a lot.

And so, as have I. Uh, we have tools in ClickFunnels. We're going to show you can do all this natively in ClickFunnels, but this is completely free. It works. This is how we've done it for the last decade. I wanna give you like a, a step-by-step walkthrough here. You, you don't need to learn anything. You don't need to invent anything. You don't need to look at new websites. You don't need to look at new ways to do this. This is how we've done it forever. And you can do it right now today, completely free this way. And it will work perfectly. So to use Bitly, Bitly allows us to make long links, short links. That's all it really does. So we're gonna hop over here. I'm gonna paste in my long link, right? I made my UTM source, I made my UTM medium. I did all that in my URL builder and it gives me this long URL. So I'm gonna paste that long URL here. We're gonna hit get our link for free. Oh my goodness. It's gonna make me create an account. Come on. Do I have one here? Um, let me see. This might have something. Come on, come on, come on. Okay, whatever. Okay, cool. So we're gonna create, I wanna shorten a link. I'm gonna paste my entire link right here, and then I wanna shorten the link. I didn't bring any of my domains into Bitly, so I just get a, a Bitly link, which is totally fine. People are so used to seeing these by using a Bitly link. I promise you are not allowing confusion to enter. Everybody knows what these Bitly links are. Everybody's clicked on one at some point in, in their past. So you're totally fine using this. You do get to make the back half, right? So whatever you might want this to be, I'm gonna just say secret. I'm sure that's gonna be taken, but there we go. If you want, right inside of Bitly, you can also make UTM parameters, but I don't need to teach you that right now, and I don't even need you to try that right now. If you're making UTMs for the first time, I really want you to do it the way I'm showing. I want you to go to the GA DevTools to make the UTM the specific URL. Then I want you to take it to Bitly and I want you to make Bitly shorten that link. So secret is a common back half and that's already used, but maybe, uh, we're going to say, uh, lib, L-I-B, link in bio. Let's see if that's taken. Looks like that's taken as well. We're just going to go with the auto-generate for now.

Sure.

Let's go with that. That's fine. Uh, let's try this. Let's try this. And we're just going to do like this because I know that won't be taken. Great. So once we come up with a unique back half to our domain, we're going to create our link. There it is, gang. Here's my new link. I went to the GA DevTools. I made my UTM link, my specific specific UTM link. It is a long link. So I copied that link, I took it over to Bitly, and I turned that long link into a really, really short link. Now check it out. I'm gonna copy this link and I'm gonna open up a new tab. Gang, keep an eye up on my browser, please, in the search bar. I'm just sharing. I took the link that Bitly gave me, my shorter link. I copied it. And I'm putting it in a new tab. Just like if, if you were to put a post on Facebook, you put this link in the post and people click on the link. It's exactly what we're doing here. So I go to this link, keep an eye on my URL bar. I press enter and it is gonna take me to my actual UTM link. Everything is still perfectly trackable and measurable. Everything is working wonderfully here in this setup. I use the GA DevTools to make my UTM. I shorten it with Bitly, making it sexy and on par and not confusing to people. I then take this link and I put it in my posts. Put it in your Facebook post, put it in the description of your YouTube video, share it on your Facebook post. However you're marketing, however you're sharing and talking to people, This is the link that I want you to share. It's clean, it's concise, it's simple. And again, when we click on that link, we are actually taken to our UTM URL. So that's it. That's UTMs in a nutshell, like how to make the actual UTM, how to do the thing. And I'd love for you guys to make your first one. Make it simple, make it with something, you know, maybe you know how to make Facebook posts. You're really comfortable with that. Maybe you're already making YouTube Shorts. Just make a UTM for your next YouTube Short or your next thing that you want to share an asset for and just do it on one platform. Do it on one, go into your funnel, change up your filtering, filter by UTMs, and then look at your stats. And I promise once you do it for one, it will make total sense and you'll say, ah, I understand exactly how I need to do this now. Matt, anything to add from there? It kind of took took it over from you.

It's all good, man. I, I would say start doing it, start doing this now. Um, a year or two from now, if you're still marketing, which I know you guys all will be in marketing and using ClickFunnels and sending links, you're gonna have links all over the place, and you're gonna hope and wish that you've been like, dang, Matt and Dante back in the day, they were right, I should have started using that. Because you're going to want to know where that traffic, where your traffic sources are coming from and what's working and what's not.

So you bring up a great point, Matt. How many times do we hear— like, so many times— excuse me, I'm just getting over a cold— so many times we, um, um, so many times we'll work with people and it's like, man, over the past year I was able to do this and do this. It's like, wow, it's amazing, I'm so proud of you. But then we'll tell them a strategy or a concept or like I would have done this for the past year. And they're like, oh, oh my gosh, I wish I was doing that. Like, like on the e-com side of things. Oh, I wish I had recurring built into my offer. I wish I had monthly recurring revenue, man, over the last year and everything I've done. If I had recurring built into my funnel, oh my gosh, look at where I'd be. Same thing here, looking at and understanding our data, especially for our experts out there. Especially for the experts. Man, Dante, if I would have known this information over the past year, I would have focused all my efforts on Instagram. All my real traffic is coming from Instagram. And all this year I didn't know that. I was spending so much time on Facebook and LinkedIn, and I was actually not even paying much attention to my Instagram. But oh my gosh, if I knew this entire last year that Instagram was the real driver of all these sales I had coming in, and if I would have just doubled down on my Instagram presence, Holy cow, I did this this year, but I could have done this this year. Oh, I wish I knew. So don't let yourself be that. Don't let yourself be, I wish I knew a year down the line. Be the person that does and says, I know.

Yeah, you may end up at some point at— you might be like, well, I need help because I'm stuck. And you might have to hire a coach, or you might end up on, uh, you might end up on a Zoom call with Dante or somebody that's a performance coach, and they're probably gonna— you're gonna go, I need help getting more, figuring out how to get more sales. And the first thing, or probably one of the first things that they should be asking is, can you tell me where you're— what's working and what's not? Tell me which source of traffic is bringing you the most sales. And if you don't know, or bringing you the most traffic at the very least, if you, if you don't know that right off the top, you should be able to go, I'm getting the most traffic from Instagram. So I know that that's going to work. And let me tell you a secret: not all traffic has to come from Facebook. You can get traffic from everywhere. Like, it's— there's so many places. So no, know where it's coming from so that, so that you can optimize that 100%.

Like, Reddit kind of rocks, guys, and people forget about Reddit all the time, but We need to be able to make data-driven decisions. We need to be able to test. We need to be able to know the metrics on the tests and the things that we are doing. And number one way to do that is simple UTM filtering. So I really enjoyed sharing that with you guys today. Nat, thanks for hanging out with me. As always, gang, this is Tech Tuesdays. It's built by funnel hackers for funnel hackers. We're not up here trying to do cool shows so we can feel better about ourselves. I assure you there's a million different ways that we could do that. This is all for you and about you. We wanna help you where you are. We wanna literally meet you where you are and help you over those hurdles. So as always, feel free if there's something you're struggling with, if there's a part of ClickFunnels or just a part of this marketing world that you're like, man, I don't understand this. How do I do this? How do I implement this? How does this work for me? We would love to hear that from you. So maybe we can make a show about it specifically for you. On that note, gang, it's been great to talk about UTMs today. I cannot wait to see how you guys do it. Let us know how the tests go as you do this thing. Let us know and let us know what it does for you as a business owner. Hey, I did UTMs. I got some data. I was able to make a decision on that. What did it do for your business? What did it do for you as a business owner? We'd love to hear that. We always look through these comments and we love hearing everything you guys have to say. So for everybody here at ClickFunnels, Myself, Matt included, it's been great to be with you guys. Have a great time grabbing some data this week, and we'll look forward to seeing you guys next week.