utm.io Review

What is utm.io?

If you’ve ever worked in an environment where multiple team members can create UTM links and you’re the one responsible for analytics based reports, you’ll know one of the most common frustrations comes from inconsistent and irregular naming conventions. E.g. Is it Facebook, facebook or FB?

Additionally, with out a centralised control sheet to understand what has been set-up, it is very easy to lose track of the links.

utm.io’s promise and raison d’être is consistent naming conventions and data, along with a centralised library of UTM links.

In their own words…”UTM.io is the best way to build, share and sync your UTMs with your team. Stop using messy spreadsheets and get good campaign data in your analytics.”

How easy is it to set up utm.io?

Signing up is very easy and done with your Google account. Upon first login you’ve got the classic onboarding checklist AND highlighted area of interest.

Having the two at the same time is a bit odd though.

The two primary functions of utm.io are:

• UTM links: Creating UTM links is very easy and there is a Chrome extension available to do this on the fly.
• Templates: Templates are a very useful tool to build commonly used UTM combinations you can apply to new links. e.g. Medium is “paid social”, source is “Facebook” and campaign name is left blank to complete per campaign.

That is pretty much it.

The software doesn’t add a huge amount on top of what can be done with a spreadsheet, a little time and strict naming conventions policed internally.

Before the likes of Office365 and Google Sheets, maintaining a single source of truth was difficult. 

Now, thanks to cloud based storage, it’s really easy.

The templates are a nice idea, but again, I can copy and paste in a spreadsheet just was easily.

Community and support

utm.io has a well written support database that is easily accessible from within the dashboard. You can also raise a support ticket.

Final thoughts

The free version of utm.io is fine, but I can’t see enough value to upgrade to a paid plan.

A combination of Google’s URL builder, agreed upon and tightly policed naming conventions and a well thought out spreadsheet addresses all the issues it claims to solve.

You can argue not many businesses have that, but if you’ve identified it as a problem you’ve also taken a step towards fixing it. Just go the whole way.