Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] 1, 2, 3, 4. That's about how long it takes to tag up a link so you know exactly which piece of content is getting you clients and bringing you money. About four seconds. If you've done it a few times, if you're spending money on content, ads, email, social media, and you have no idea what's actually working, then this is the episode for you.
[00:00:36] Hey, welcome to the Agency Hour podcast. This is a slightly different format of the podcast. This week, I'm just gonna teach you something super helpful because I'm so frustrated by having the same conversation over and over again with our agency owners. And frankly, I was really frustrated myself. And so I went looking for a solution, and we found it. So I'm just gonna share it with you right now.
[00:00:57] So our vision here at Agency Mavericks is is to become the most helpful team on the planet for digital agency owners. And our mission is to find one digital agency owner every day to help. And our values are to share the love, tell the truth, and get it done.
[00:01:13] And so that's really informing a lot of what we're doing now with the content moving forward is every piece of content we produce.
[00:01:21] The question we ask is, how do we be the most helpful team on the planet for a digital agency owner? And this episode is part of that.
[00:01:28] So I just want to talk a little bit about the problem with marketing. And there's this old saying that, you know, only half of your advertising dollars work. The problem is you don't know which half. And then, of course, the Internet happened. And in theory, we should be able to track everything.
[00:01:43] But the problem is platform dashboards like your Facebook ads account, your Google Analytics, your Google Ads account, your TikTok ads account. They only tell you half the story, right? You look at the dashboard and Facebook will tell you how much your cost per lead is or what your ROAS is. But if I asked you, hey, show me the 13 people that clicked on that Facebook ad and became customers, or the 75 people that clicked on that Facebook ad and joined your email list. Can you tell me who they are? Can you give me a name, an email, and a phone number? I doubt it. In fact, a recent report from HubSpot says that 33% of marketers in 2026 still cannot tell if their campaigns are effective. That's a third of us spending money on ads or spending time and money and resources on content, email, social media, making videos, whatever it is we're doing, with no idea if that spend and that effort is effective. And you have to remember that the Platforms like Facebook, Google, TikTok, they are designed to make themselves look good because they want you to keep spending money. So I don't care what anyone says, these platforms are always going to over report, right? Facebook is going to say that your cost per lead is $12. Google is going to say that your campaign is highly effective. But neither of these are telling you the full story. They're not telling you the truth. And I know this because it happened to me. And more than once. And more on that in a minute. I'll come back to that story in a minute, but just want you to imagine for a moment before I get into the how to fix this. I just want you to imagine a moment that you're flying a plane and you have no instrument panel. Now, on a clear day where there's no fog, there's no rain and conditions are beautiful, that's fine. You just look out the window, you can see the horizon, you can see the mountain in the distance, you know what to dodge and it's all good. But the moment conditions start to get weird, the moment there's rain or there's fog or there's other air traffic, you need that instrument panel to tell you whether or not you are on track, how high you're flying, your speed. You need that instrument panel to keep you from crashing and burning. And this is what UTM parameters are to marketers.
[00:04:01] Now if you don't, if you've never heard of a UTM parameter, a quick origin story here. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. It was a little piece of software designed in the mid-90s by a couple of guys in San Diego who just wanted to know where their website traffic was coming from. They were really early adopters of Internet marketing and they were driving traffic to their website predominantly with Google Ads back in the day. And they didn't really know where the traffic was coming from, right? And so they invented the UTM and they eventually sold that to Google and it became what we now know as Google Analytics. And it is the standards. It's been around for, you know, over 20, probably 30 years now. It's been around and it really still is the standard of how to track your traffic, where it's coming from, what people are responding to and what's working and what's not.
[00:04:55] So that's what UTM stands for. Now I'm going to break down each of the UTM parameters and tell you exactly what they mean and then give you some practical guidance on how to start using them. And also there's a second piece to this puzzle, which I'll talk about in a moment, which is your tracking pixel.
[00:05:11] So UTM Attribution framework works like this.
[00:05:15] There are five UTM parameters that you can attach to the end of a link. And if you've clicked on a link on the Internet, the next time you click on any link on the Internet, I would encourage you to look in the browser bar when you go to that link. And you'll probably see these UTM parameters appended to the end of the link. So your link will say something like scale.agencymavericks.com? and then it will be utmsource equals and or ampersand utn, utm_ medium equals ampersand utm_ campaign equals on, and so forth. And so the five UTM parameters are number one source. And this is where the traffic is coming from.
[00:05:54] LinkedIn, Facebook, your email list, your website, YouTube, podcast. Right?
[00:06:01] So where is the traffic coming from? In other words, where was someone when they clicked on this link? If I put a link underneath the show notes of this podcast on Spotify, then the source would be Spotify. If I had a different link in the show notes on our website, the source would be website. Okay, the medium is how the link was delivered. Is it a social post? Is it a blog post? Is it an email?
[00:06:27] Is it a paid ad? So, for example, we used a link in our recent YouTube video, and it was an info card, and so the source was YouTube and the medium is info card because that tells me how the link was delivered. Okay, If I'm sending an email, then the source would be email list and the medium would be email. If I'm putting a post on my personal Facebook profile, the source would be Facebook and the medium would be post.
[00:06:55] Right? If I'm. If I've got a button on our website, in the, in the header of our website, we've got a call to action button that encourages people to request a call. Then the source is website, the medium is button. Or the medium might be header. Right?
[00:07:11] The third parameter is campaign, and campaign answers the question, why are people clicking on the link? What is it that they're interested in? What is their motivation? And so again, if you look at the parameter that we used for the link for the YouTube video, it would be AOS. In fact, that's the only campaign we're running at the moment is aos, which is the agency operating system. We're sending everyone to scale.agencymaverics.com to have a conversation with us about installing the digital agency operating system in their agency to help them grow their agency without becoming the bottleneck.
[00:07:44] So campaign might be Black Friday, might be Q1 webinar promo. Okay, what, you know, what is the campaign? Why are people clicking on the link? The fourth parameter is content, and this answers the question, what did they respond to what piece of content? What was the topic of the content that they responded to?
[00:08:05] And in our case, it would be the link that we use. The the content was utm because we made a video about UTM parameters. And so the link content equals utm.
[00:08:17] If you're running Facebook ads or Google Ads, then the content would be the ad name, or it might be the email link, or it might be the subject line of the email, because that's what people responded to. And then the term answers the question, who?
[00:08:32] Who is it that's clicked on this link? And this was originally. The reason it's called term instead of audience is because this was originally, remember back in the days of Google Ads, that you would run a Google Ad for a particular keyword or a term.
[00:08:46] And so this is mainly meant for paid advertising, whether it's search or social. It is, hey, these are the people that I want to target. They're clicking on ads for this particular keyword. However, if you're using this on social, which is not driven by keywords, it's driven by interest.
[00:09:05] You can use interest targeting. So these are people who follow, you know, Tony Robbins, or these are people who are interested in parenting, or the way that we use it is if I'm posting something on Facebook, I will put profile or group as the term because then I know that the link went to the audience in our group or my followers. Same with LinkedIn. I might put followers as the term, because then I know that the audience is my followers. So just to recap the five parameters and the questions that they answer when you're looking at them in a dashboard, parameter number one is UTM source, and that answers the question, where did the traffic come from? The second parameter is UTM medium, and that answers the question, how was the link delivered?
[00:09:49] The third parameter is campaign, and that answers the question, why did someone click on it? What's their motivation?
[00:09:56] The fourth parameter is content, and that answers the question, what did they click on? What was the topic of the content?
[00:10:03] And then the fifth parameter is UTM term, and that answers the question, who are they? What's the audience that we're targeting here? Now, my understanding is, and I'm not an expert by any stretch here. But my understanding is that if you, if you use source, medium and campaign, then your UTM parameters will track correctly in Google Analytics. By the way, full transparency. I have not opened Google Analytics for years. I don't use it. It's a horrible product. I can't get my head around it. It's probably me, not them, but I just don't use it. However, my understanding is that content and term are optional. Source, medium, and campaign are not optional. You need to have at least source, medium and campaign.
[00:10:44] We typically use those three.
[00:10:47] Sometimes we'll use content and term, depending on the link that we're publishing. Now I'm just gonna give you a free resource and Again, watch the YouTube video that we put out this week around UTM parameters. If you want to see a screen share of this, but here's the resource, go to utmbuilder.net utmbuilder that's all one word. Utmbuilder.net it's totally free. It takes about 10 seconds to set up a link. All you need to do is put in the URL of the page that you want to send people to, which in our case is scale.agencymavericks.com just in case you missed it. And then you just fill in the parameters. Source, medium, campaign, content, and term. Right.
[00:11:32] And so, for example, your Source might be LinkedIn. Medium would be post, Campaign is whatever the thing is that you're promoting and, and content is the specific post that you produced. What is the topic of the post? Facebook ad would be source. Facebook, medium. Typically with medium, we use ad set as our medium. This is a whole other conversation, but we use ad set as our medium so that we can see straight away. It's the second parameter that comes up in our reporting dashboard so we can see straight away. Okay, this came from Facebook, this came from this ad set. And the campaign is the campaign name, and then content is the ad name. Right?
[00:12:11] Typically speaking, you could argue, right, that we should use the ad set name in term and that medium should be cpc. The reason we use the ad set name in the medium is just because it's the second parameter that comes up. And the way our reporting dashboard works is that, you know, it's go, hey, Facebook or meta ads is the source.
[00:12:32] Medium is our ad set name. So we can see immediately which ad sets are profitable and which ones aren't. Okay, here's the second piece of this which is really important is the tracking pixel.
[00:12:41] So you may have heard of tools like Hiros, which you know, help you understand which ads are more profitable. There's other software platforms like Segmetrics that put a pixel on your website and then plug into your CRM. Now, I've tried all of them and I'm sure they're all great and I'm sure they all work, but I just couldn't get them to work again. I'm convinced that the problem exists between the keys and the chair. It's probably my fault, right?
[00:13:07] But I just couldn't find anything that worked. And then I did find a software pixel that we've partnered with and we've rebranded it. We call it Hawkeye. We're rolling it out for us and all of our clients. This is not an ad, by the way, so I'm not trying to pitch it to you because we're only doing this for our clients that we work with one on one. It's part of the tech stack and part of the done for you services that we're offering our agency owners these days. So again, you can't go and find it and sign up for it. It doesn't work like that. It's not available to buy as a software, so don't even bother trying to find it. But our Hawkeye Pixel does this.
[00:13:40] We install a small snippet of code on our conversion pages and you'll now truthfully, we put it in our Google Tag Manager. So it's across our entire website. But at bare minimum, you need to have this on any opt in page, any page where there is a form completion. Right? So an opt in page for a lead magnet. You need to have it on your application form. If you encourage people to apply to work with you, you need to have it on your application form, you need to have it on your calendar booking pages and you need to have it on your contact us form at bare minimum. But really just stick it in your, in your header of your website or in your Google Tag Manager and then it's across your whole website. And then when someone converts on any of these pages, Hawkeye. What Hawkeye does, the Hawkeye Pixel does is it as soon as you hit our website, it keeps a track of you via your IP address and your cookies, right? And then when you convert and we've got your name and email, it retrospectively says, oh hey, this person's been on our website for the last three weeks now we know who they are. Here's a name and email and a phone number. It matches that up against your browsing history on our website and we can see The UTM parameters that drove first attribution. In other words, the UTM parameters that brought you to our website and then the UTM parameters that converted you into an application or a booking. And I'll tell you what's really interesting. We see this happen all the time. Social ads, Facebook meta ads, right? Will drive leads, they drive traffic to our website and they get people to sign up. And that's first attribution is typically meta ads, you know, ad set, ad name, and usually it's ads about our agency operating system with screenshots about our agency operating system. They're the kinds of ads that drive traffic to our website and get people to fill in an application form and maybe, maybe fill in a calendar booking and schedule a call. However, email is the thing that books the most calls for us. And it makes sense. People know that working with us is going to be, you know, an 8, 10 or $25,000 investment and a 4 month or a 12 month commitment. So they're not going to respond to a Facebook ad, land on our website, and within 72 hours, you know, cough up 10 grand to work with us. It does happen occasionally, but not very often. Typically people need more nurturing. There needs to be more trust in the relationship before they're gonna make that kind of commitment. And so social ads are really good for driving traffic and getting people into our ecosystem. And then email is what does the heavy lifting and books most of the calls. How do I know this? Because we're tracking UTM parameters and my Hawkeye dashboard shows, shows me Hawkeye. By the way, we named most of the software that we use in the business and that we roll out for our clients. We named it Hawkeye because Hawkeye is that kind of reconnaissance mission aircraft that has all the satellites and the aerials on top. And in the old days, you would send an aircraft out into airspace to monitor and see if there were any enemy aircrafts in the airspace. Right. And so that's what we think of it as like Hawkeyes out there working on your behalf, having a look at the marketplace, seeing what's happening, seeing what's working, and then reporting back to you and sending you signals back so that you can plan, you know, come up with a strong game plan based on what's actually happening, even if you can't see what's happening. So that's why we named it Hawkeye. I've had a few questions around that, so I just wanted to answer that. And so the Hawkeye pixel says, great, here's someone who came to us from Facebook ads, but now they've actually converted into a booked call from email. Right. And also we optimize for qualified call bookings. And so the way this works, and this is what you just very, very hard to get this kind of data out of Facebook ads or Google Analytics. Technically it's possible if you use Google Tag manager and a whole bunch of JavaScript to trigger events. It's just too fricking hard for my liking. I just don't have time to do that. Which is why we use the Hawkeye Pixel, because it just does it. Right? What happens is when someone moves through our sales pipeline in high level, when they move to a different sale stage of the pipeline, it fires an event back to our Hawkeye Pixel. The Hawkeye Pixel says, oh, hello John. John has now turned up to his call with our sales team and has either booked a follow up call or has become a client or is thinking about it and is in a follow up sequence. And based on that, based on the fact that John turned up and that we made him an offer because he's a good fit, he's a qualified icp ideal client profile. Right. We know we can help him. He can afford to pay us, he's highly motivated, he's coachable, he's 100% committed. He just hasn't decided yet. Or maybe he has. Based on that criteria, we know he's a qualified appointment. So we send that message back to Hawkeye. Hawkeye then says, great, we've got that, we've logged it. We then send that back to our Facebook ads account and we say, hey, Facebook, that's a schedule, right? Someone just booking in our calendar. Sure. Most people who book in our calendar are not qualified to work with us. Right? So why would I send that information back to Facebook and say, that's a schedule, go get me more of them? I don't want unqualified people in our calendar. I only want qualified ideal clients in our calendar. Right? Big shout out to Dr. Matt Shiver who taught me this. And so we send that information back to Facebook via our Hawkeye Pixel and say, facebook, go get me more people that look like this because they're qualified. They turn up, we have a conversation, we make them an offer, they close. Now I know what my actual roas is.
[00:19:10] So I would say two months ago, Facebook was telling me that my appointments were costing me $200 when I installed the Hawkeye Pixel and we really started using UTMs properly and we started tracking it. I can now tell you that a qualified appointment is costing me about $700.
[00:19:27] That's three and a half times more than what Facebook was telling me.
[00:19:32] So if I'm getting calls booked for 200, I would scale that every day of the week. $700. That's a different conversation. I need to try and bring that down because I know if my conversion rate, say, 30%, it's gonna cost me $2,100 to onboard a client. Now, clients worth 10 grand, so you'd still do that every day of the week. But that's a harder thing to scale than if a call is costing you $200 or, you know, 12 months ago, Facebook was telling me that I was getting calls booked for less than $100. I can tell you because I can see my bank account, right? And our. Our conversion tracking sheet that, like, 90% of those calls that were costing us $100 weren't qualified. So what is the fucking point? Like, seriously, what is the point of spending all day on Zoom with people who don't have the money to pay you? There's just no point. And so now we have quantifiable, you know, and qualitative and quantitative data that tells us exactly what type of content we should produce because it attracts our ideal client. Okay?
[00:20:34] So when we set this up for clients, typically what happens is in the first seven to 14 days, everything comes back in the. In the Hawkeye pixel as direct organic. That's what everything's attributed to. And you know what that means? It means that nobody's tracking anything. It means they're not using UTM parameters. So we have a ton of agencies now who are using the Hawkeye tracking pixel. And we show them, hey, we've installed the pixel after seven days. Look at this. All your traffic is direct organic. What that means is that someone's either typing your web address into the browser. Unlikely. Or they're clicking a link and landing on your website. And that link has no UTM parameters. And so by default, we don't know what to do with it. So we just assign it to direct organic. That's the way Google Analytics works. It's the way all the analytics platforms work, right?
[00:21:21] Once the UTM tags are in place, suddenly you can see that the LinkedIn post on Tuesday generated three opt ins. One of those booked a call. The email newsletter is outperforming paid ads. Ad version B is beating ad version A by a ratio of 2 to 1. And the moment going from everything is direct organic to I can see exactly what caused that appointment. That's when actual decisions become possible based on data, right?
[00:21:48] So you don't have a marketing problem. You have a measurement problem. You have an attribution problem. And most agency owners think they need better ads, better copy, a better funnel. The amount of times I have had a conversation with an agency owner who says, I'm gonna hire a sales closer, I'm gonna hire someone to rewrite our copy. I'm gonna hire another media buyer. I'm gonna hire this agency to do cold outreach. And I say to them, what's currently working really well.
[00:22:17] They have no idea, right? And so it's like flying the plane without the instrument panel and saying, you know what, dude, I'm just gonna go a little bit lower. We're just gonna fly a little bit lower. Even though the windscreen's really foggy and it's pissing down rain and I can't see anything, I just don't reckon there's a mountain in front of us. So I'm just gonna fly a little bit lower and try and get under these clouds, bang straight into the side of a building, right?
[00:22:42] So, sorry if that's triggering for anyone, but the instrument panel would say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't drop the plane because there are buildings underneath you, so you got to go higher. You're going to go above the clouds. You got to go above the storm. Right? Because the instrument panels tell you exactly what's working and what's not. So every dollar you spend on marketing without UTM tracking is a dollar that you just have no idea if you're going to get a return on it. Right? And that's not a strategy. Now, this isn't five parameters, 10 seconds per link. And if you use whisper flow, which I do to talk to my computer all the time, this takes four seconds. I've timed it. This takes four seconds to produce a link, right? So a free tool to build them, a pixel to read them. You start today, you tag the next link you publish within two weeks, you'll have more visibility than most business owners get in a year. All right. I hope you found this helpful.
[00:23:36] I'm going to do more of this kind of stuff where I just really lean into something super technical and help you guys get some shit done.
[00:23:43] This is my goal, really, is just to share everything we're doing, let you know what's working, what's not. You know, there's no call to action here, except maybe subscribe. Share this with another agency owner you think might find it helpful or any other business owner you think might find it helpful. Tag your links, track your people, and stop guessing. All right, I'm Troy. Dean. Let's get to work.
