TommyCarey
Level X3
Write the reason you're deleting this FAQ
A lot of people are running ads or putting up banners on 3rd party websites in order to gain additional traffic to their websites, but they rely solely on their analytics dashboard to show them where everything is coming in from. The problem with that is you don't always know what ads are bringing in the most customers and which ones should be canceled and never resubscribed to again.
I recently ran into a problem like this when using BuySellAds. I had maybe 10 ads up and running, but I was just sending traffic to my homepage, then I would watch my analytics dashboard to see how much traffic I was actually getting. I could assess my sales increases and know if a new ad was working, but I was never 100% sure if it was the new ad or if an old one had increased its performance randomly. Along came UTM links and now I use them for absolutely everything, even when the dashboards on Adwords or Analytics are super advanced lol 
I waited a couple months to make sure I wasn't getting random spikes in success with old ads and I was able to figure out exactly which ones needed to be deleted and which ones needed some more love. I was able to cut out about half of my ads that were sending traffic but not a single lead, which saved me around $400 a month, and I wish I would have done this sooner lol.
What are UTM links?
UTM stands for "Urchin Tracking Module" and allows you to track the source, medium, and campaign name you label for the URL you're promoting. Urchin Software Corporation was purchased by Google back in 2005 and essentially laid the foundation for what you now know as Google Analytics.
The links will give you a little bit more information than just where your last click came from. You can have it show that your sales came from a PPC campaign through a specific ad group and even which ad. It's like a performance tracker for any type of link you place online, not just in a PPC campaign, and it can come in very handy when you want to know what posts or pages are sending you the most sales
Why would I use a UTM link in my PPC campaigns?
A lot of people just link up their Adwords and Google Analytics accounts so they run side by side and share information, but are you only using Adwords to drive traffic? If you said "Yes, I'm only using AdWords to drive traffic to my website!" then you need to branch out a bit because not everyone uses Google
Look at my example above, I used UTM links for all of my banners and was able to save $400 a month because I could delete ads that weren't performing, even though they were getting a decent amount of clicks. If you're placing a link somewhere in hopes of getting people to click and then sign up for your system, service, or to buy a product from you then you can always be using UTMs on those links in order to get additional information
How many UTM links can I have?
The beauty of this is that you can have an unlimited amount of UTMs for any page of your website. You can have the source and medium be the exact same on every UTM you build, and you can change the campaign name to just be 1 or 2 or 3, and now you have 3 different UTMs for the same URL
A lot of people, myself included, have various UTMs for the same page. This is because we will have various ads out there aimed at the homepage of our websites, and we need to know exactly where the traffic is coming from and what's converting the best.
Don't the PPC platforms track my performance?
They definitely do! But why wouldn't you get as much information as possible to boost your success and reduce the possibility of wasting money on certain ads like I did through BSA?
The more customer information you have before and after a checkout, the better you will be because you can now optimize for that type of client and make even more money. You will know what ads are performing the best, which ones need to be deleted, and you'll know which ads or keywords are sending in the most sales.
In conclusion
You don't have to use UTMs with your URLs if you don't want to. Google Analytics tracks a great deal of information and it is likely all you need, but not all dashboards will allow you to link in your analytics, so by using UTMs, you will know exactly what's working and what isn't. I like to play it safe and use UTMs whenever I'm posting an ad, just so I know if it's working well, and I'm not wasting money each month on something that hasn't sent me a single sale lol.
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Thanks!
Tommy Carey