8:57
UTM parameters explained for solar installers
This video is about UTMs — and what they actually let you see as a solar installer.
You’ve probably heard the term thrown around by marketers before. It sounds technical, but you don’t need to understand how UTMs work under the hood to get value from them.
What matters is this: UTMs show you where your leads come from, and more importantly, where your sales come from.
In this video I break down what UTMs are in plain English, how we use them across Google and Meta, and why combining them with a CRM completely changes how confidently you can spend your marketing budget.
This is about clarity.
Not complexity.
For context, this video was originally recorded on 12 January 2025, views & strategies may have changed since.
Featuring
Video transcript
Good evening and welcome back. This video is for solar installers that want a better idea of exactly where their leads are coming from, both digitally and physically, or offline. We’re going to talk about UTM parameters.
You’ve probably heard this term thrown around by marketers before. People trying to sell you things saying, “We’ll track it through UTMs,” or “We’ll put UTMs on that and add tracking.” It sounds really complex, but it’s actually not. And you don’t really need to understand how it works technically. You just need to understand what it does, what it allows you to see, and what kind of data it collects for you. Ultimately, it tells you where your leads are coming from and where your money is coming from, meaning your actual sales.
You might be getting loads of leads from one source and none of them are closing. At the same time, you might be getting fewer leads from another source, but every single one of them is turning into a sale. If you’ve got a good CRM in place and you’re using UTM tracking parameters, you’ll be able to see that clearly.
So I’ll walk you through what UTMs are, how we use them, and what kind of results you can expect from implementing them.
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. I didn’t even know this before making the video, but apparently it comes from some discontinued analytics software that Google acquired years ago. The name itself doesn’t really matter. The important part is the tracking. UTMs allow you to track the source, campaign, and context of where a lead came from.
Here’s a simple example. Let’s say I want people to go to my website. I’m running Google Ads and Meta Ads, and I want to know who came from Google and who came from Meta. Over time, that also lets me see not just which platform gets cheaper leads, but which one actually drives deals further through the pipeline and generates revenue.
In the UTM source field, I might put “Google” or “Google Ads.” That automatically creates a URL with some extra characters added to it. It looks messy, but all it’s doing is tagging that visit with information. Spaces are just replaced with plus signs.
If I were running Meta Ads instead, I’d change the source to “Meta.” Then you can add a medium. For example, if the source is Google and the medium is CPC, you know that traffic came from Google Ads specifically.
You can then add a campaign name. Let’s say you’re running a campaign around solar installations in Bedfordshire. You might name the campaign “Bedfordshire Solar.” At that point, you already have a very solid level of tracking.
You can go further if you want. For example, if one version of the campaign is offering a no-obligation survey and another is offering an instant quote, you can add that as an extra parameter. All of a sudden, you’ve built a very detailed tracking link. It looks horrible, but it’s incredibly powerful.
When someone clicks that link and submits a form or converts in some way, all of that information flows through to whatever tool they converted in. For many of our clients, the full UTM string is submitted alongside the lead. That’s useful straight away because it gives context. A salesperson might open the lead and say, “Thanks for checking us out on Google. I saw you came through our Bedfordshire solar advert. How can I help?”
At the same time, that data also flows back into the advertising platform itself, whether that’s Google or Meta. Alongside things like pixels and conversion APIs, UTMs help tell the platform which campaigns are driving conversions. That’s how you build accurate analytics around where your leads are coming from and where your budget should actually be spent.
We track all of this through Perspective, which is the tool we use to generate leads for our clients. Right now, we can clearly see things like the source of the lead, for example Facebook. Soon, they’ll be adding even deeper UTM reporting directly inside the platform.
Even now, we can export the full data. For example, we can see the campaign name, the specific ad concept, whether it was video-based, and which platform it came from. All of that feeds into our backend systems.
We’re currently building out a very extensive operational setup in Airtable. That allows us to drill down with extreme precision. We can look at a specific campaign concept across all clients and see the average cost per lead, how it compares to other campaign ideas, how individual assets perform, and how a specific client compares to the wider portfolio.
That’s where this becomes really powerful. Because we manage accounts for multiple installers, we can aggregate that data, spot patterns, and use it to inform strategy across the entire client base. This is what allows smaller and mid-sized installers to compete with large energy companies and tech-first businesses that rely heavily on software, automation, and quote tools.
That, in a nutshell, is what UTM parameters are and why they matter.
Part of the reason we make videos like this is because we use terms like UTMs all the time, and we want to make sure we can clearly explain what they mean. We don’t want to just throw jargon around and expect people to understand our world, especially when we don’t fully understand all the jargon in the renewable space either.
Hopefully this helped bridge that gap a little bit. Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll catch you in the next one.
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