You're a mortgage lender. You have your marketing team and a budget, and you’ve decided this is the year you’ll finally swim to the deep end of the pool and explore spending those dollars on digital marketing. You’ve heard the stories of how it can be a great way to drive leads – but can also be a great way to lose tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There’s one foolproof way to put those marketing dollars to good use: keeping track of what generates leads and adjusting your approach accordingly.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you are using Google Ads. You’ve got your ads setup into campaigns, and you’ve optimized your landing pages and website to convert leads. Now you want to be able to track the leads that come from a Google Ad into your website or landing page. 

One of the ways to track digital advertising performance is through UTM tracking which is a simple code that can be attached to any URL to generate Google Analytics data for digital campaigns. Google Analytics helps you track this conversion by using UTM parameters. 

There are 5 UTM parameters which each start with “utm_”. The 5 different parameters are: campaign, medium, source, term, and content. When traffic comes to your website or landing page from a Google Ad that is setup with UTM parameters, it can include any number of these parameters. Considering the following URL as an example:

https://www.mortgagefirst.com/lp/va-loan-b1001?s=&utm_source=google&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=google-competitor-purchase-bmm&utm_content=mortgage-first-bmm.

1. The first UTM parameter is utm_source=google. This identifies which site sent the traffic. It could also be “instagram”, “facebook”, or “twitter”. 

2. The second UTM parameter is utm_medium=ppc which identifies what type of link was used. In this example it was pay per click (ppc). 

3. The third UTM parameter is utm_campaign=google-competitor-purchase-bmm. This identifies a specific product promotion or strategic campaign. 

The term UTM parameter identifies the search term that was entered by the user, such as mortgage+rates+in+colorado. Another less frequently used utm parameter is utm_content which identifies what specifically was clicked to bring the traffic to your site, such as a banner ad or text link. This could read utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink.

UTM parameters are helpful for tracking in many use cases, such as email campaigns, social media campaigns, and paid campaigns. 

The above three UTM parameters can be a game changer in analyzing your traffic and improving your conversion numbers. Mortgage lending marketers can make the most of UTM tracking and can make more informed efforts into advertising thanks to UTM codes. 

UTM parameter tracking is available in your Google Analytics account, but learning to find and understand this data can be difficult. The benefit of working with Bankingbridge is that we parse out the UTM parameters for you, and pass them directly to your CRM which improves lead tracking through your CRM.

The following screenshot is an example of how we break out those parameters.

With Bankingbridge, it’s easy to see how many leads your paid ads generate, and how many of those leads make it to closing. Passing UTM parameters to your CRM makes tracking leads from application, to underwriting, to closing simple and effective. 

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