Bulk UTM generator: Create UTM URLs for your social, email and paid campaigns in bulk

Sometimes building URLs one-by-one just doesn’t cut it. Some large campaigns may have many URLs and UTM parameter combinations. It takes too long to build all the possible combinations of UTMs and URLs. 

For example, you may need to share several URLs on different social media sites, run display campaigns for different a variety of banner sizes, run search campaigns for different keywords. 

Using a simple URL builder to generate all your URLs can get time consuming. This calls for some advanced tools that can generate URLs in bulk while enforcing all the UTM constraints. We’ll see how Terminus can help as a bulk UTM code generator. We are going to consider several UTM requirements in this example.

Let’s say you are part of an important financial organization that sells insurance and financing products for automobiles (among many products in their portfolio).

Requirement 1: Building UTMs for several URLs

Your team just published some new blog posts with these URLs and wants to generate traffic for these pages.

www.mysite.com/blog/auto-insurance-purchase
www.mysite.com/blog/auto-financing
www.mysite.com/blog/how-to-buy-your-next-car

Requirement 2: Building for several social networks

Promoting blog posts on social media sites can be quite effective in getting a lot of visitors who can then further share these URLs to their followers, friends and other people in their network. As part of your social media strategy, you to promote the new blog posts to these networks:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Linkedin

Requirement 3: UTM Campaign has complex structure/taxonomy

For large organization, the UTM codes are not always simple. To capture all the important dimensions, UTM codes are often composed of multiple fields with a specific structure. For example, a UTM campaign could look like

<goal>-<product category>-<product name>-<date>-<campaign name>

An example UTM campaign may look like

lead-insurance-life-2022_07_18-winter_sale

Requirement 4: Create UTM campaign values with multiple campaign names

While promoting these new blog posts, you want to test a couple of possible campaigns to see which one generates the most revenue. You decide two possible values, summer_10p (10% discount) and summer_15p (15% discount) for the last part of UTM campaign structure (above), i.e. campaign name.

URLs to be generated:

Based on the above four requirements, the number of URLs generated should be

3 URLs X 3 social networks X 2 campaign names = 18 URLs

Creating 18 URLs one-by-one can be time consuming and highly error prone, especially considering your complex conventions for UTM campaign name (Requirement 3).

How to generate URLs in bulk:

To generate such URLs in bulk, there are couple of options:

1. Spreadsheets:

It’s possible to enter all the above requirements in a spreadsheet and do the following steps:

1. Populate an entire row and generate one URL
2. Copy the row and change one value, say the URL, and create another row.
3. Repeat 2. for all URLs.
4. Copy all the existing rows and paste them. Update the social network to say Linkedin
5. Repeat 4. for all social networks
6. Copy all existing rows and update the campaign name.

The above process relies on the person not making any mistakes, typing correctly and following the exact steps every time. You can see how this is highly error prone and can significantly affect your analytics.

2. Terminus Bulk UTM builder

Terminus can help you incorporate all the requirements and formalize them in a coherent UTM building solution. When you switch to Grid Mode Builder, it enables a compact, spreadsheet-like interface that enforces your UTM conventions. Here’s how easily you can build all the UTM URLs in bulk.

Click the Play button to see it in action.

Paid Display campaigns:

Besides social campaigns, creating such URLs in bulk can be useful in various other types of campaigns. If you are running paid display campaigns, you may want to generate UTM codes for all banner sizes. Here are just a few of them

468 × 60	Banner
728 × 90	Leaderboard
930 × 180	Top banner
970 × 90	Large leaderboard

These banner sizes are commonly found in UTM Content parameters, but can be anywhere in a complex UTM convention. You can use the bulk builder to generate all possible combinations of banner sizes and create all URLs at once.

Paid Search Campaigns:

If you are running highly targeted search ads with specific keywords, it may make sense to add them to your UTM tracking to make sure they are correctly tagged and show up in your analytics reports. In those cases you might need to generate UTM URLs for all the keyword combinations.

You can use the UTM bulk builder to generate the URLs before using them in your ad platform like Adwords.

Other features:

The bulk URL builder need not just build URLs. But you can also add other meta information to optimize your team workflow. Here are just some of the features supported in Terminus.

• Add labels: Use Gmail like labels to group URLs in your account.
• Add notes: Add description to each URL (even in bulk) to elaborate why it was created and how it was used.
• Add meta information: Use Info fields to add structured data to each URL.
• Auto-shorten all URLs: All the URLs are shortened automatically for using in any type of campaign.
• Attach retargeting pixels: Attach any type of retargeting pixel automatically to generated URLs
• Export via CSV or API: Export all the URLs and meta information to combine with other data for in-depth analysis.
• Fine grained user permissions: Assign role based permission to lock down your UTMs and conventions
• Advantages of a compact spreadsheet-like UI, but without the drawbacks of formulas.

References:

• Step-by-step instructions on how to use Grid Mode URL Builder
• How to configure UTM Conventions