With a resume builder, you can build a personalized professional resume that passes ATS, stands out to the hiring manager, and helps you land your next job interview.

Resume builders are incredibly helpful when creating a resume and can help you showcase your unique personality. Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best free resume builders. Keep reading, and then get to work designing your own with these tools.

Why use a resume builder?

Writing a polished resume is second nature for some job applicants. But even the most experienced professionals can struggle while making a resume.

If you’re one of the many people who need a little extra help with resume creation, here are a few ways that a resume builder can help:

Saves Time

Resume builders offer templates, clean designs, and tips that speed up resume writing. They also make the process less stressful.

Offers Writing Tips

It takes a lot of work to promote yourself. And even if you enjoy self-promotion, writing isn’t a skill everyone has. A resume builder can help you use the best words and phrases to show your experience and knowledge.

Improves Design

Each industry has different expectations for what a great resume looks like. If you’re not familiar with design skills or tools, resume builders offer free templates to make your resume look as good as it sounds.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

Recruiters often use ATS systems to scan resumes. And a good resume builder will help with formatting to make sure that your resume is easy for these systems to read.

We’ve discovered the best free resume builders on the market. These resume builders are great for all jobseekers, from entry-level to executive level. Each free resume builder has a simple interface, customization options, and templates that help you create the perfect resume for your next job.

Featured Resource: HubSpot Resume Templates

Download these free templates to get your thoughts on paper and plan your resume before using a free online resume builder.

1. Zety: Best for Expert Resume Creation Tips

Zety is an excellent online resume builder because of its state-of-the-art templates. You can quickly start from scratch and input your information. My favorite element of this tool is that the site will walk you through the process. All you need to do is fill out the information, and then — voila! You have a resume. While this tool is free, you’ll need to make an online account.

To use Zety for free, click “Download” on the left toolbar once you reach the final step of the builder — instead of selecting “Save and next.” Then, choose “Plain Text (.txt)” to download your resume for free.

Best For

Zety is best for those looking for expert help in creating their resumes. The tool provides tips and prompts to help you create the content for your resume. There are also a variety of customization options to ensure your resume fits your needs.

While you can download a .txt file for free, it costs $2.70 for a different file format, and some templates use graphics and colors that interfere with ATS.

Available Resume Templates

There are 18 resume templates to choose from, including Cascade, Crisp, and Concept.

Verdict

Zety is a fast and easy resume-building tool and offers writing help at crucial moments in the process. But you won’t be able to take advantage of its simple and attractive resume templates without paying a small fee.

2. Resume Genius: Best for Easy and Fast Resume Creation

Resume Genius is undoubtedly one of the easiest and fastest free resume tools you have at your disposal. With a clean and easy-to-use interface, the tool walks you (speedily) through the sections of your resume, including education, work experience, and references.

Resume Genius provides you with easy fill-in-the-blank sections so you can have an impressive, comprehensive resume in no time.

Best For

Resume Genius is best for those looking for step-by-step guidance when creating a resume. The tool offers tips and advice at each stage of the process.

Resume Genius’ search options help you build an ATS-optimized resume that’s customized to fit your industry and position.

Available Resume Templates

Resume Genius has over 500 templates varying from Taj Mahal to Classic. Its resume builder tools let you scroll through different templates to see how each one looks with your information.

Verdict

This resume builder feels intuitive to use and offers helpful suggestions to polish your resume. But the template selection step can feel rushed, and you’ll need to pay a small fee to make the most of their wide range of templates.

3. Wepik: Best for Customizing Pre-made Resumes

A lack of graphic design knowledge is no longer an issue thanks to Wepik, a user-friendly editing tool. This tool allows users to create the most professional and attractive visual branding documents with ease.

Once you’ve picked your perfect resume, import and complete your information into the template including your academic background, contact information, and business experience.

With one more click, download the document in your preferred format and you’ll be more than prepared to share your professional profile in minutes.

Best For

Wepik is a great tool for small businesses and individuals looking to create a quick, professional-looking resume and cover letter. Users will have access to completely free premium-level features within the online editor, such as a broad library of pictures, fonts, and graphic elements.

Available Resume Templates

This tool includes over 100 resume templates. Wepik also has thousands of ready-made templates for cover letters, name tags, cards, and more.

Verdict

Wepik makes it easy to plug your work experience into a beautiful template. Unlike the previous resume builders, it works more like a visual editor and doesn’t offer as much writing help as other tools. But this tool does offer AI writing help, and you can download your finished resume in PNG, JPG, or PDF formats.

4. My Perfect Resume: Best for Guided Resume Creation Help

My Perfect Resume allows you to either start from scratch and input information into a blank template, or upload a pre-existing resume if you already have one. Plus, the tool offers you expert recommendations as you move throughout the process, including suggested phrases you can include for specific roles.

My Perfect Resume also enables you to include optional sections like certifications, accomplishments, and affiliations. This is vital, particularly if you’re just starting out, or switching industries. This tool is particularly useful if you’re applying for a creative role and want to add color or a unique design to your resume.

To use My Perfect Resume for free, click the”Download” button once you reach the final step of the builder instead of selecting “Finish Resume.” Then, choose “Plain Text (.txt)” to download your resume for free.

Best For

My Perfect Resume is excellent for those looking for guided help when creating their resumes. The tool recommends templates based on your experience level and provides expert recommendations for skills to include based on your job titles. Compared to other tools on the list, there are fewer customization options.

Available Resume Templates

This tool has over 40 resume templates. It automatically shares template options based on how long you’ve been working. You can also filter templates by categories like Modern, Traditional, or Creative.

Verdict

This tool is super user-friendly and does a good job of anticipating and resolving challenges in the resume-making process. It also gives you a chance to experiment with templates before and after you’re done editing your resume. But to make the most of its optimized templates you’ll need to pay a fee.

5. Standard Resume: Best for Active LinkedIn Users

Standard Resume allows you to import your qualifications straight from LinkedIn, making it an ideal time-saver if your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date.

The white background and minimalist features enable you to focus on what really matters — your content. You can switch back and forth between “Write” and “Design” to see how your resume looks as you go along. To download it as a PDF you’ll need a paid plan, but you can share it online for free when you’re finished. Best of all, the tool also makes your resume mobile-responsive so that you can view it on your smartphone.

Best For

Standard Resume is great for LinkedIn users looking to quickly create an ATS-compatible resume. The tool uses your LinkedIn profile to automatically build a professional resume. Standard Resume also provides tips and best practices you can consult as you complete your resume draft.

Available Resume Templates

Standard Resume offers 12 streamlined resume templates including Yew, Venables, and Cordova.

Verdict

The “Review Score” feature offers a clear score and set of recommendations to improve your resume before you start designing. It also offers an easy way to share an attractive resume online. But you’ll need a paid plan to download your resume as a PDF.

6. Canva: Best for Design Creativity and Expression

If you’re applying for a creative role or want a resume that truly lets you stand out, you might consider using one of Canva’s hundreds of free designer templates.

Canva’s selections are incredibly varied and unique, so you’ll undoubtedly find one you like, and inputting resume sections can be as easy as copy-and-paste.

Best For

Canva is best for those looking for resume design creativity and expression. Although not specifically designed for resume building, the tool offers a wide variety of templates, layouts, and designs to choose from when creating your resume.

Available Resume Templates

Hundreds of templates, organized in categories, such as Graphic Design, Corporate, and Creative. This makes it easy to choose based on your preferred industry.

Verdict

This design tool can help you create a unique and visually-stunning resume. But if you’re looking for help formatting, writing, or editing your resume, you may want to look for another tool.

7. Indeed: Best for In-Platform Job Seekers

Creating an Indeed resume is an incredibly quick process. Best of all, the site allows you to automatically share your resume with employers on Indeed as soon as you’re finished. If you’ve already completed a resume, it’s still a good idea to upload it to the site for exposure to potential employers.

While Indeed doesn’t offer as many options for creativity as some of the others on this list, it’s an impressive option if you want to create a more traditional resume and start sharing it right away.

Just add your pre-written resume content, add it to a template, and download your resume as a PDF.

Best For

Indeed’s free resume builder is best for those looking to immediately jumpstart their job search after creating their resume. It guides you through the resume creation process with expert advice and prompts to help your resume catch employers’ attention. Resumes created using Indeed’s free resume builder are designed to be viewed and picked up by ATS.

Available Resume Templates

This resume builder has eight simple templates, including Executive, Modern, and Minimalist.

Verdict

This resume builder is most useful if you’ve already used a resume template to write each section. It’s a quick way to make your resume look clean and professional, but if you’re looking for writing help or advice, you may want a more comprehensive tool.

8. Resume.com: Best for Minimalist Resume Creation

With Resume.com, you can build a beautiful resume in minutes. This tool is an excellent choice if you’re looking for recommendations on what to include in your resume. And this resume website has popular templates for various job categories to help you stand out from the competition.

To use this for free, when you’re at the last stage, you’ll see a pop-up that says to create an account — instead, just click “Skip for now.” Then, in the top right-hand corner, you can click the download button.

Best For

Resume.com is great for jobseekers looking to quickly create a professional resume. This 100% free resume builder provides resume examples to help you during the process.

Available Resume Templates

This tool offers 15 simple resume templates, including Apollo, Tempe, and Terra.

Verdict

This resume builder is easy to use and offers general tips to inspire your resume creation. That said, if you haven’t already written a resume you love, it doesn’t offer any personalized help to improve your resume.

9. Novoresume: Best for ATS-Friendly Resume Building

If you want a quick, modern, and professional resume, check out Novoresume. This tool is especially popular for creative industries such as graphic design, writing, or marketing. Its drag-and-drop editor helps you customize your resume to your needs.

Plus, its “Content Analyzer” tool can give you ideas for content, formatting, and design. This makes it an excellent resume builder if you’re changing careers or need an all-in-one resume tool.

Best For

Novoresume is an excellent choice if you want an ATS-friendly resume. The platform checks for relevant keywords and resume format for ATS system optimization. Its templates are eye-catching but still meet the strict ATS guidelines. Plus, Noveresume has a free ATS checker to scan your final document.

Available Resume Templates

This tool offers eight free resume templates, and more with the premium version.

Verdict

This tool offers a range of features to create a well-designed and easy-to-read resume that you can quickly download to PDF. But many features come with premium pricing, and there’s no option to upload an existing resume for editing.

10. VisualCV: Best for Multimedia Resumes

Creative industries like photography, advertising, and design often like to see a resume with visual appeal. While many resume builders offer fetching designs, Visual CV offers a drag-and-drop editor to create a truly custom resume.

This tool also gives you a chance to track the performance of your online resume and multimedia extras. This lets you update your resume and attachments with data-driven ideas.

Best For

Besides an appealing resume, creatives often submit multimedia applications with an online portfolio, videos, images, or links. This resume builder makes it simple to add media directly to your resume, adding interaction and visual engagement.

Available Resume Templates

This tool has over 20 attractive templates, including Denali, Quartz, and Fuji.

Verdict

This resume builder is a great way to create an attractive and professional resume, with loads of premium choices. While technically a free tool, without upgrading to a paid account, you’ll have a large watermark on your new resume PDF.

11. CakeResume: Best for Resumes With an Online Portfolio

CakeResume is one of the best resume websites for creative resumes. It offers customizable templates and a rich media editor to embed videos, images, and PDF files directly into your resume. It also includes resume optimization for ATS.

Make your resume stand out without coding experience using this simple interface and drag-and-drop tools. Once you’ve designed your resume you can preview to make sure your final resume is formatted correctly, then click “Download PDF” to save your new resume.

Best For

This resume builder is for job seekers who want to add an online portfolio, video, quote, or slideshow to their resume. Your online portfolio can include recent projects to help you stand out from other candidates and get to the job interview stage.

Available Resume Templates

CakeResume offers 10+ multimedia-friendly resume templates.

Verdict

This resume builder is excellent for creating resumes that incorporate other media or important links. But it doesn’t include tips for writing, so it’s useful to use a resume template for drafting your resume before using this resume design tool. 

12. Resume-Now: Best for Time-Saving Resume Creation

Creating a custom resume for each job application is ideal, but it can also be a headache because of the time drafting a resume can take. But Resume-Now is an intuitive resume builder with a ton of customization choices. It offers key phrase and skill suggestions for both ATS and the recruiter you need to impress.

Smart templates, a clear interface, and useful advice make this a great tool for resume building in no time. To download your resume, instead of clicking “Save and Next” at the bottom of the screen, click “Download.” Then, select Plain Text to download your resume for free. Other resume download formats will mean a charge.

Best For

Resume-Now uses powerful templates and useful tools to speed up the resume creation process. This makes it perfect for job seekers who want to create a personalized resume for each application. You can also make your resume interactive and track resume engagement once you’ve finished.

Available Resume Templates

Resume-Now offers over 30 attractive resume templates.

Verdict

This is a comprehensive tool for efficient and effective resume building. But you lose the unique quality of the templates when using the free version only.

13. ResumeNerd: Best for Resume Writing Help

ResumeNerd is a super helpful tool for new job seekers creating resumes. It offers dozens of pre-written bullet points, expert resume coaching, and customizable designs. If you’re not sure how to write a resume, this could be the resume builder for you.

Another bonus this builder offers is industry-specific resume samples. That said, if you’re looking for a free tool, this free download is .txt format only.

Best For

This resume builder is a top choice for help with writing a resume. Its features include writing suggestions and pre-written sections for highlighting skills and experience. This tool is also super user-friendly for creating quick and polished resumes.

Available Resume Templates

This resume builder offers 13 unique templates, including Hospitality, Impresa, and Heron.

Verdict

ResumeNerd is a helpful resume builder for people building a first resume. But the suggestions and tips may not be as useful for people with more work history.

14. Hloom: Best for Resume Templates

Whether you need a modern, creative, or traditional template, Hloom can help job seekers in any industry. This customizable and easy-to-use resume builder can help you create an eye-catching and ATS-friendly resume or CV.

This tool is comprehensive too — you can add fonts or images to amp up your design or use the resume writing tips to improve your resume.

Best For

Hloom offers a selection of over 400 professional resume templates. You can edit any template to your specific needs, saving time and effort. This platform also offers cover letter and reference templates to keep your personal branding consistent across your job applications.

Available Resume Templates

HLoom has over 400 templates available, and offers categories to help you find the best template for your needs.

Verdict

HLoom is a simple and straightforward resume builder that offers a range of templates and tips for resume creation. Like many other tools, users need to pay to get all the benefits of designed templates, as it limits free downloads to Plain Text files.

Building a resume can feel like you’re staring at a blank canvas. But with an online resume builder, you can get recommendations and build a beautiful document that will stand out without needing a graphic design degree.

What’s the best resume builder?

The best resume builder for you will vary depending on your needs.

If you prefer a tool that guides you through the process of creating a resume, we recommend using a builder that provides tips and suggestions. If you prefer a resume builder that automatically creates a resume, we recommend a tool that pulls information from LinkedIn. If you prefer having creative freedom when building your resume, we recommend using a tool that includes customization options.

Choose the resume builder that meets your needs and fits your industry and personal style, and you’ll be well on your way to earning a second look from hiring managers.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2019 and was updated for comprehensiveness. 

Read on for our in-depth review of Printify, covering its pros, cons, pricing, services, and use cases, to see if Printify is right for you. 

Printify Pros and Cons

Pros

• Free-forever plan
• 20% discount on products on select plans
• Global shipping
• Over 800 product options
• Drag-and-drop design tool

Cons

• Extra shipping costs on orders from multiple printers
• Printify API only available on Enterprise plan
• Complex refund policy

About Printify

Printify is an all-in-one print-on-demand solution for dropshippers. Ecommerce platforms can integrate with Printify, making it a snap to add customized merchandise to your online product catalog. A customer places an order and then the production company gets notified to produce the product, fulfill the order, and ship the items directly to the consumer. It’s as easy as that. Ecommerce retailers never have to touch the products, but can still offer customized items to their customers—making Printify one of the best ways to start a print-on-demand business. 

It also represents a fast and affordable way to order other types of customized merchandise. For example, businesses can rely on Printify for creating branded corporate apparel or accessories. It’s also a way for schools and sports teams to place bulk orders for students, athletes, and fans. You can even use Printify to order custom items in bulk to sell through your brick-and-mortar retail stores. 

Printify Health and Stability

Since Printify’s launch in 2015, the platform has been used by over 6 million merchants selling over $500 million in products. Printify has an extensive product catalog of over 800 items, ranging from socks, shirts, and hats to tree ornaments, backpacks, kitchen accessories, and more—which can all be customized through the platform’s free-to-use design tool. 

Since Printify doesn’t actually produce, print, or ship products, they’ve partnered with over 110 printing and manufacturing companies. They’re simply providing the software and logistics to connect their users with production companies that can handle a wide range of items. 

This is a fast-growing tech company in the United States that’s privately owned. With more than 600 employees worldwide and backed by over 40 investment companies that have raised over $50 million in funding to keep up with Printify’s demand and growth, Printify is reliable and stable for the foreseeable future. 

As long as Printify continues to partner with quality production companies and add more to their network to meet the growing demand of ecommerce sellers, it’s safe to assume they’ll be around for a while. You can confidently use Printify’s platform and infrastructure as the foundation to start or expand an ecommerce business. 

Printify Pricing

Printify is 100% free to use. You can integrate your online sales channels with Printify and create an unlimited number of product designs for up to five stores, all on Printify’s free-forever plan alone. Alternatively, you can pay for a Printify membership that gives you access to product discounts, order management tools, and support for more storefronts. 

Printify Pricing Structure

There are two main components to Printify’s pricing structure—memberships and product merchandise costs. 

For memberships, you have the option to select a Free, Premium, or Enterprise plan. We covered everything included in the Free plan a few paragraphs above. 

Premium plans start at $24.99 per month and unlocks discounts of up to 20% off all products you order through Printify. You also get access to Printify Connect, which helps you with order management elements like fielding returns and exchanges. Enterprise plan pricing is completely customized to match the number of stores you want to sell on. You can use Printify’s core services and design tools at every membership tier. 

Regardless of whether you pay for a membership or opt for the Free plan, you’ll need to pay for the products that you’re customizing via Printify. The cost per item varies based on the manufacturer and product type. For example, you might find t-shirts starting around $5, bathing suits for $20, and car mats for $60. But you only pay for these items when a sale is made through your online store. 

Printify Trials and Guarantees

Printify does not have a free trial, but it does have a free-forever plan that offers much more value. In fact, the Free plan can be a viable option on its own for businesses that are just getting started or anyone with lightweight printing and fulfillment needs. It offers access to Printify’s mockup generator, 24/7 support, and integrations with all major sales channels—including Shopify, Etsy, and eBay. 

All of Printify’s partner merchants are backed by a thorough vetting process they conduct on all providers they add to their network. In-house Printify experts will regularly order different samples with complex designs as a way to assess quality. They also send weekly performance reports to all providers with specific complaints and additional performance metrics. 

If merchandise is printed incorrectly, damaged during delivery, or falls short of quality standards, you can contact Printify for a reprint. If there are additional issues or a reprint can’t happen, you may be eligible for a refund. With that said, the refund policy outlined in Printify’s terms of service is somewhat complex, and refunds are issued as a credit to the merchant’s Printify account, not as cash. 

Printify Overview

Printify delivers an easy-to-access, easy-to-use print-on-demand solution with dropshipping fulfillment services and bulk ordering options. We’ll take a closer look at these three facets of the service below. 

Print on Demand

Printify is arguably the best print-on-demand service on the market. Aside from its extensive product catalog and vast network of print providers, using Printify is ultra-simple. 

Even if you don’t have a design background, it’s really easy to use Printify’s mockup generator. This tool is 100% free to use by just creating a Printify account. You can play around with different colors, fonts, sizes, and images on products using the drag-and-drop editor until you’ve created something you like. 

Then you can preview your designs as a realistic 3D image. You can even use these exact same images for your product listings on your website or as promotional materials on social media. 

Printify seamlessly integrates with a lot of major ecommerce platforms and sales channels, including Shopify, Etsy, Walmart, eBay, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, and PrestaShop. Businesses with an Enterprise subscription can also access the Printify API for building custom integrations and addressing unique sales needs. 

Overall, Printify lowers the barrier to entry for anyone who wants to sell custom-printed products online. You can create your own designs and let Printify handle the rest. 

As for the products available, your options are virtually endless. Here’s a small sample of the different categories within Printify’s catalog of over 800 products:

• T-shirts
• Hoodies
• Shoes
• Socks
• Underwear
• Baby clothing
• Hats
• Car accessories
• Tech accessories
• Travel accessories
• Posters
• Mugs and glassware
• Towels
• Blankets

The list goes on and on.

With that said, Printify’s extensive merchandise options can sometimes make things more challenging than they need to be. For example, let’s say you want to sell something simple on your ecommerce website, like a custom shirt. You’re going to see dozens of different options from dozens of print providers, all around the same price, without having the products in front of you to compare in terms of feel, fit, and the like. 

So, finding the right t-shirt to customize and sell can take some trial and error. If you’re serious about selling high-quality products online, it’s probably in your best interest to order some samples from different printers before you formally add the merchandise to your product catalog. 

Premium plans start at $24.99 per month with an annual subscription. Sign up for free to get started. 

Dropshipping Fulfillment

Printify’s dropshipping and ecommerce fulfillment is part of its print-on-demand solution that takes things a step further. 

Let’s say you’ve already customized an item through Printify, integrated the platform with your online store, and listed the product for sale. Once a customer places an order on your website, the printer will be notified to actually create and fulfill the order. They’ll add your custom design to the item purchased and then ship it directly to the consumer. 

It’s worth noting that the shipping rates are not part of the price you pay per item. These are calculated separately, and shipping rates are based on the printing company, product type, and customer’s location. 

One cool part of Printify’s fulfillment solution is that it can automatically prevent issues due to stock shortages. If enabled on your account, you can set it up so orders are automatically sent to another partner to fulfill the order if there’s a shortage with the provider you originally selected. 

You can also use Printify’s geo-routing feature for overseas shipments. They’ll automatically find the closest printing facility to help cut down on shipping costs for international orders. This is also a faster way to get these products shipped to your customers. 

There are a few potential downsides to the way orders are processed, especially if you’re using multiple suppliers for different products on your site. 

For example, if one of your customers orders a t-shirt and hat from your website, but your shirts come from a printer in New York and your hats come from a printer in California, these items will be shipped separately to your customer. And, you’ll be charged two different shipping rates for each. 

Passing these shipping fees onto your customers can be tricky because they’re just ordering from a single website. Depending on your pricing structure, you may have to absorb these extra shipping costs or have this baked into the price of each product listing. 

All of the dropshipping and fulfillment services come free with your Printify account. But, you’ll need a Premium or Enterprise plan if you want Printify to handle reprint requests and refunds on your behalf. 

Bulk Ordering

Most people use Printify’s print-on-demand service to sell products online. But it’s also a great way to create large quantities of custom merchandise for other use cases. 

If you’re ordering 60 or more qualified products from the same print provider, your purchase may be eligible for a bulk discount, saving you up to 30% on shipping rates. 

There are lots of different use cases for Printify’s bulk ordering service. Maybe your company is sponsoring a local event and you want to hand out t-shirts to all attendees. Or, maybe you want to order 100 custom mugs with your company logo as gifts for your employees. 

This service is also commonly utilized by non-profits who want to sell merchandise to support a specific cause. Whether you’re selling merchandise or giving it away for free, the bulk ordering service from Printify still puts you in total control of the item designs. 

You can even use the bulk purchasing option to order inventory for your brick-and-mortar retail stores. 

The only potential downside of a bulk order is that you’re paying in full for all items. So, if you’re planning to use this service for inventory, you need to have the cash in advance. It’s not the same as using Printify for ecommerce fulfillment, where you only pay for items when a sale is made. 

Submit an offer for a bulk order on Printify and save up to 30% on shipping. 

Printify’s Reputation

Printify has an excellent reputation across the web. It’s highly rated on several different third-party review sites, with glowing reviews from real Printify users. 

Most of the reviewers have positive things to say about Printify’s support and ease of use. Several users mention how Printify has made it easy for them to start selling online via a print-on-demand business. Lots of reviews also mention how Printify offers competitive pricing and a vast selection of product options. 

However, not everyone had glowing things to say about Printify. But, it seems like the majority of bad reviews were tied to poor product quality or issues with a specific printing company. While Printify has to approve the printers within their network, these types of issues are otherwise out of Printify’s control. To us, these seemed like one-off problems and shouldn’t be enough to stop me from using Printify to sell custom products online.

Final Verdict

Overall, we recommend Printify as a solution for all your print-on-demand needs. Whether you’re starting a new ecommerce store from scratch or just want to expand your product offerings, Printify is an excellent choice to consider for custom designs on over 800 product types. 

It’s 100% free to sign up and get started using, and you’re in total control over your designs. Printify helps set you up for success, making it easy for you to find the right printing providers for all of your merchandise.

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This in-depth review includes everything you need to know about UltaHost, including what it has going in its favor and any shortcomings of the service, plus information about their pricing, reputation, and service offerings. Read on to find out if UltaHost is right for you and your web hosting needs.

UltaHost Pros and Cons

Pros

• Affordable plans
• Flexible billing structure
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• 24/7 customer support
• Free migrations

Cons

• Unclear uptime guarantee policy
• Smaller and relatively new company
• Lots of upsells during checkout

About UltaHost

UltaHost specializes in web hosting. Like other hosting providers on the market, they also provide additional web tools and services, like domain registration and SSL certificates. But the vast majority of UltaHost’s offerings focus on hosting.

They offer some advanced and use-case-specific hosting solutions, like virtual dedicated hosting, CRM hosting, social network hosting, Minecraft servers, and more. Webmasters looking for root access and customization options at the server level can also use UltaHost to configure unique options. 

UltaHost Health and Stability

Founded in 2018, UltaHost is a relatively new hosting company. While they’ve performed well and delivered on their promises since the initial launch, they haven’t quite proven that they’re able to stand the test of time. The company currently has fewer than 50 employees, which is definitely on the smaller side in this category. 

In comparison, there are other hosting providers on the market that have been around for over 20 years and host millions of websites worldwide. Some of UltaHost’s competitors are publicly-traded companies with thousands of employees. 

With that said, it’s unfair to fault UltaHost just for being new. They’ve shown no signs of trouble and seem to be growing at a reasonable rate. Plus, their reputation for excellent customer service is likely to attract more customers and retain the ones they already have. But you can’t assume with full confidence that they’ll still be around a decade or two from now. They still have to prove their resilience and sustainability over time. 

UltaHost Pricing

UltaHost’s web hosting plans start as low as $2.90 per month. For every hosting type they offer and plan tier, UltaHost stands out for being an exceptional value. 

It’s common practice in the web hosting industry for providers to offer rock-bottom introductory rates for new customers, only to skyrocket the price when the contract renews. While UltaHost does offer promotional pricing for new customers, the renewal rates are much more reasonable—typically only a few dollars more per month, compared to some of their competitors who ratchet the rate up to north of $10 per month. 

UltaHost Pricing Structure

UltaHost’s pricing structure is based on hosting type, server resources, and contract length. For each type of hosting offered, UltaHost typically has at least four different plan tiers to choose from—with each one providing more resources and the ability to accommodate more site traffic. 

All plans are priced per month, but the actual cost you pay depends on your billing cycle, and the price per month decreases as your contract length increases. UltaHost offers six different billing cycles for you to choose from, including monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, biennially, and triennially. 

For example, UltaHost’s shared plans start at $3.29 for month-to-month billing at the entry-level tier. But you can pay $100.44 today to lock in a three-year contract, which drops the cost per month to $2.79. 

We’ll get into the nitty-gritty details of each type of hosting’s pricing in just a bit.

UltaHost Trials and Guarantees

UltaHost offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on most of its hosting services. This doesn’t apply to domain registrations, certain add-ons, dedicated servers, or virtual dedicated server (VDS) plans above $96.50.

UltaHost advertises a 99.99% uptime guarantee. However, it’s unclear whether or not sites will be compensated if UltaHost fails to deliver on that promise. There is no mention of this anywhere in UltaHost’s terms and conditions or refund policy. Other, more-established web hosting companies tend to have a clear policy for downtime recompense.

UltaHost Overview

Continue reading to learn more about UltaHost’s core services, with in-depth assessments of each web hosting solution. This will help you determine which, if any, is the best for you and your website’s needs. 

Shared Hosting

UltaHost’s shared hosting is one of its most popular offerings. This is largely due to the attractive pricing for quality performance. 

There are four different plan tiers to choose from—each providing additional storage and the ability to accommodate more traffic. 

The Shared Starter plan is a viable option for hosting a single website with up to 10,000 monthly visitors. This is the logical choice for any new website that doesn’t anticipate a high volume of traffic from the get-go. 

The other three shared tiers can support up to 15,000, 25,000, and 49,000 monthly visitors, respectively. There’s still plenty of room for your site to grow on UltaHost without having to upgrade out of inexpensive shared hosting. 

All plans come with unlimited bandwidth, free daily backups, and free SSL certificates. If you sign up for an annual billing cycle or longer, you’ll also get a free domain name for one year. 

You’ll benefit from 24/7 proactive server monitoring included, which is definitely not something you’ll see from most other shared hosting providers on the market. And, UltaHost offers free migration services, so if you’re unhappy with your current hosting provider, you can move to UltaHost for free, without the hassle of dealing with the technical aspects on your own. 

Just be prepared to navigate through some pesky upsells while you’re checking out and finalizing your plan. It can be a bit much.

Shared hosting plans start at $3.29 per month or $37 for a full year. Your purchase is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee. Save up to 30% when you sign up today. 

Managed WordPress Hosting

If you’re currently using WordPress on your website or planning to use WordPress, going with a managed hosting plan from UltaHost is a no-brainer. These are still shared plans, but they’re actually cheaper than UltaHost’s traditional shared plans—which is almost never the case when you compare shared hosting to managed WordPress hosting. 

You’ll benefit from UltaHost’s WP Manager tool that comes standard with your plan. From there, you can access customizable themes that are built specifically for WordPress and much more.

Since WordPress comes pre-installed with your hosting plan, setting up your site is a breeze. If you have any questions, you can rely on UltaHost’s dedicated WordPress experts, 24/7/365.

UltaHost is optimized for WordPress, so you and your site visitors will experience a higher level of performance. Plus, as a fully managed plan, all of the technical aspects are handled for you on the backend. This includes automated backups and automated security updates for your servers and WordPress plugins. You’re ensured that your site performance remains in tip-top shape.

Once your hosting is set up, I definitely recommend adding Google Analytics to your WordPress site. This is a quick and easy way to track your best pages and see how your site is performing. 

Managed WordPress hosting from UltaHost starts at $2.90 per month. But the Business WordPress plan is the best value here. Starting at $7.50 per month, it can handle up to 100,000 monthly visits, and it’s cheaper than the Shared Business plan—which starts at $10 per month and only supports up to 10,000 monthly visitors. 

VPS Hosting

UltaHost’s virtual private server (VPS) plans are perfect for sites and webmasters seeking more control over their hosting configuration. It’s also a solid choice for websites getting at least 50,000 visitors per month.

In terms of performance, this is a step above UltaHost’s shared plans. You’ll benefit from faster page loading speeds and higher uptime rates, which is ideal for business and ecommerce sites that can’t afford to lose users due to a poor on-page experience. 

UltaHost’s VPS packages are scalable and highly secure. UltaHost offers dedicated firewalls, regular security packages, 24/7 monitoring, and BitNinja Security built-in. 

You can start with 1 GB of RAM and then scale as needed from your control panel. This is a great perk for sites with unpredictable traffic and seasonal surges. 

If you have in-house IT professionals or you’re working with a developer, they’ll love the added flexibility and control that comes with your VPS server. This includes full root access and the option to select your operating system and server locations. 

The only downside of UltaHost’s VPS servers is that the setup is a bit confusing and overwhelming for non-technical users. If you don’t have a developer on your team, you may be unsure how to customize your settings appropriately. Of course, the pay-off from this level of performance can be worth spending a little bit of time educating yourself about VPS hosting.

UltaHost’s VPS plans start at $5.50 per month. You can also get an advanced VPS plan that’s built for high-traffic WordPress sites, which starts at $27.50 per month and accommodates a whopping 300,000 monthly visitors. 

Virtual Dedicated Hosting

A virtual dedicated server, also known as VDS hosting, is a somewhat unique service offering from UltaHost. This isn’t something that you’ll find from many other hosting providers on the market today.

VDS hosting is a step above virtual private servers. While it’s technically a virtual plan, you’re getting the same features as a dedicated server—without the hefty price tag. 

The main reason to consider a VDS plan from UltaHost is if you need to install custom software on your server. 

For example, you may want to host creative assets on UltaHost that you’ll be selling through Envato’s marketplace. Or, maybe you need a safe, reliable, and affordable way to host a customized CRM for your business. Access to your own virtual dedicated server allows you to host cloud-based software portals and a whole lot more.

If you’re on the fence about whether or not VDS hosting is right for you, then it’s probably not. This is a highly technical option built for the demanding web-based projects and services. For those of you just looking for a high-performing host for your traditional website, a VPS plan will typically be the better option. 

UltaHost’s VDS plans start at $37.50 per month, which is less than one-third of the price of its entry-level dedicated server plan. So, it’s a great bargain if you want the level of performance and features typically only offered by dedicated servers without paying dedicated server hosting rates. 

Dedicated Server Hosting

Only a small fraction of people reading this will need dedicated servers from UltaHost. For simply hosting a single website, you can eliminate this option right away.

Dedicated servers are the top-of-the-line in the world of web hosting, and they’re designed for ultimate speed and performance. As the name implies, you won’t be sharing any resources with other websites and you’re renting entire physical servers directly from UltaHost. 

This solution makes sense for enterprise organizations looking for database storage options and other data-intensive needs. It also works well for multi-national organizations that need to host a mix of websites, applications, and data.  

Let’s say you want to start your own social network, or you want to host multiplayer servers for a game that you’ve developed. These are scenarios where you’d want to consider a dedicated server.

UltaHost handles all of the monitoring and technical maintenance for your servers. But you’re in full control over how they’re customized. There are several different plans to choose from before you even begin configuring your options, ranging from $129.90 to $933.30 before add-ons and extras. 

Domain Registration

You can also use UltaHost to buy a domain, get SSL certificates, and even build your website from scratch. 

This registrar offers popular TLDs, including .com, .org, .net, .info, and more. You can also secure private email hosting that matches your domain. 

With that said, there’s really no reason to use UltaHost to register a domain unless you’re also getting a hosting plan. UltaHost offers free domains for your first year when you sign up for at least one year of web hosting, and your .com domain will renew at $13 per year. 

But as a standalone domain registrar, they don’t have any advantages over other registrars on the market. They’re not cheaper, and they don’t have any bulk buying tools or advanced domain management features. 

UltaHost Reputation

UltaHost has an overwhelming number of positive reviews across multiple third-party review sites. Most reviews are 4.5 stars or higher on a five-star scale, and all of them seem to contain an upbeat and satisfied sentiment. 

Lots of the reviews mention UltaHost’s friendly and helpful customer service and many UltaHost customers state that they feel like they’re getting an exceptional value for their hosting needs and they’re happy with the way their sites are performing. 

There are a handful of bad reviews, which is inevitable with any product or service. Most of these complaints seem to be one-off scenarios rather than a pattern of poor experiences. It’s also worth noting that some of these bad reviews are tied to UltaHost’s domain registration services and not the company’s hosting services. 

Final Verdict

Despite being a newer and smaller web hosting company, we can recommend UltaHost with confidence. It’s a solid choice for any new website that’s looking for affordable hosting without sacrificing performance. UltaHost also has 24/7 support and offers perks like free daily backups, free SSL certificates, and free migrations. 

UltaHost has flexible billing cycles, and it’s nice knowing that your rates won’t double or triple upon renewal—helping you keep costs low for the long run. You can start using UltaHost for shared hosting and upgrade to a VPS plan or higher as your traffic scales over time.

It’s never a simple question — sometimes, it’s answered by parameters established by certain channels. And on other occasions, it’s more a question of what’s ideal.

For example, you probably know the character limit for a tweet is 140, but did you know that the ideal length is actually less than that? (Hold tight — we’ll explain why.) 

While we’ve written before about optimizing your actual content, we thought it would be helpful to gather the numbers of character limits — both enforced and ideal — for different online channels, all in one place.

Below, you’ll find a more detailed guide to character limits and ideal character counts for posts on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, SnapChat, and YouTube.

The Length & Character Count for Everything on the Internet

1. Blog Posts

Source: Medium

Quick reference:

• Post length: 1,400 – 2,100 words
• Title: Under 60 characters
• Meta Description: Under 155 characters

Featured Resource: 6 Free Blog Post Templates

Post Body

When it comes to the length of blog posts, there are a few different items to consider. For example:

• According to Medium, posts with an average read time of seven minutes captured the most attention. Though the data on this is from 2013, this number is still widely cited. 
• The average reading speed of native English-speaking adults remains commonly cited as 200-300 words per minute, based on the results of several studies.
• At that reading rate, the ideal post length is 1,400 to 2,100 words.
• That aligns with research previously conducted by Capsicum Mediaworks, which indicated that, on average, the top 10 results for most Google searches are between 2,000 and 2,500 words.

Source: Capsicum Mediaworks

But that’s just the post body — let’s have a look at the other areas of text that comprise a full blog post.

Title

The length of your title depends on your goals, and where it will appear.

Let’s start with SEO. Do you want this post to rank really well in search? It turns out, that often has to do with the dimensions of each entry on a search engine results page (SERP).

For Google, titles of search results are usually contained at a length of 600 pixels — which Moz measures as being able to display the first 50-60 characters of a title tag.

So, if you don’t want your title to get cut off in the search results, it might be best to keep it under 60 characters.

But when in doubt, you can double-check the length of your meta description and title tags with this handy tool from HigherVisibility, or you can use Moz’s title tag preview tool.

For Moz’s title tag tool, type in your headline and the tool will show you how it would appear in Google results. 

Then, there’s optimizing your title for social sharing. On Twitter, for example, consider that each tweet has a limit of 280 characters — however, if you include an image, that doesn’t count toward the limit.

But consider that even the average shortened URL takes up about 23 characters — that leaves you with about 257 characters left for the title and any accompanying text.

In our own analysis at HubSpot, we found that headlines between 8–12 words in length got the most Twitter shares on average, while headlines with either 12 or 14 words got the most Facebook Likes.

Meta Description

A meta description refers to the HTML attribute that explains the contents of a given webpage. It’s the short description you see on a SERP to “preview” what the page is about. 

Moz notes that Google seems to cut off most meta descriptions — sometimes called snippets — after roughly two lines of text. However, there’s some conjecture that, like title tags, it’s actually based on pixel count.

In any case, it amounts to about 160 characters, though this particular outlet recommends keeping it at 155.

Again, you can double-check the length of your meta description and title tags with this handy tool from HigherVisibility.

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2. Facebook

Quick reference:

• Status updates: 63,206-character maximum | Ideal length is 40 characters
• Video: 120-minute maximum | Ideal length is two minutes

Facebook’s character limit on status updates is 63,206. However, that’s far from ideal, says former HubSpot Social Media Marketing Manager Chelsea Hunersen.

“The social gurus will throw around the number 40 characters,” she says. “That data seems to be backed up by BuzzSumo’s ranking of HubSpot’s own Facebook Page.“

But why 40, specifically?

“Ideally,” Hunersen says, “you’ll want to use the copy in a status update to provide context for whatever you’re linking to.”

That said, she notes, the copy of the status update itself isn’t as important as the copy in the meta title or meta description that gets pulled in when you insert a link into your post. That’s right — social media posts have their own meta data too.

“Often, people look at the image of the article and then directly down at the meta title and meta description for context clues,” she explains. “A lot of people don’t realize you can change those.”

Even on Facebook, it’s still best to keep your meta title to fewer than 60 characters, and to 155 for meta descriptions.

There are some resources available to those familiar with coding that let you play around with social media metadata character counts, like these templates. But unless you’re a developer, we recommend keeping it short and sweet.

Video

While Facebook allows a maximum of 240 minutes for most videos (excluding Stories and Reels), we wouldn’t advise posting anything that long, unless you’re doing a special, social-media-only screening of a full-length film.

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Facebook recommends keeping videos short to about 15 seconds so viewers are more likely to watch to the end. 

3. Twitter

Quick reference:

• Tweets: 280-character maximum
  • Does not include images, videos, or polls
  • Ideal length is 240-259 characters
• Hashtags: No more than two
• Videos: Maximum length is two minutes and 20 seconds

Featured Resource: How to Use Twitter for Business

Marketers everywhere rejoiced when Twitter finally eased up on its character count parameters, and such media as images, videos, and polls, as well as quoted tweets, ceased counting toward its 140-character limit.

Still, the “Quote Tweet” feature remains available, providing even greater character-saving measures. That happens when you press the rotating arrow icon to retweet a post, and then add a comment in the text box provided. You’ve still got 280 characters all to yourself to comment.

Ideal Length Overall

Twitter differs from other platforms in the sense that longer tweets tend to perform better and get the most engagement.

According to SEO expert Kurt Gessler, tweets with 240-259 characters tend to get the most likes. 

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The same goes for hashtags. Twitter recommends keeping your hashtags short, easy to remember, and easy to spell. The platform also suggests sticking to only one or two hashtags at the most.  

Videos

You can post a video on Twitter by importing a video or recording it using the Twitter app. In any case, the maximum video length is two minutes and 20 seconds if you’re not subscribed to Twitter Blue.

Twitter Blue subscribers can upload videos of up to 60 minutes when posting from the website, and subscribers on the app can post videos of up to 10 minutes.

4. LinkedIn

Profiles

Here’s a handy list of some of LinkedIn’s most important profile character maximums :

• Professional headline: 120
• Summary: 2,000
• Position title: 100
• Position description: 2,000 (200 character minimum)

Foote also notes that, “if you select to also post on Twitter from LinkedIn, only the first 140 characters will show on your Twitter post.”

Featured Resource: How to Use LinkedIn for Business & Marketing

Original Content

With LinkedIn’s publishing platform, users can now compose and share original written content with their networks, or publicly. Of course, that comes with its own character counts, according to Foote:

• Post headline: 100
• Post body: 40,000

5. Instagram

Quick reference:

• Bio: 150
• Hashtags: Up to 30
• Captions: Ideal length is under 125 characters

Since Instagram is, first and foremost, a platform for sharing photos and videos, the primary focus is typically your visual content. However, it’s always helpful to provide some context, and let users know what they’re looking at.

Given that, here are some helpful character counts for the text you include with your visual content:

While Instagram doesn’t seem to specify a maximum total number of caption characters, it does note that, within users’ feeds, the caption is cut off after the first three lines. For that reason, it’s advised to limit captions to 125 characters.

However, don’t leave out important information just for the sake of keeping your entire caption visible. Instead, frontload it with crucial details and calls-to-action, leaving any hashtags, @mentions, or extraneous information for the end.

As for Instagram Stories, there doesn’t seem to be a ton of detail on character limits there, either. However, because the text overlays the visual content — which is the focus — don’t obscure too much of the photo or video with a caption.

Here’s a quick example of a short Instagram bio from my colleague.

6. Snapchat

Quick reference:

• Character limit: 80 per post

Speaking of not obscuring visual content — that brings us to Snapchat.

Instagram Stories was, many believe, an effort to emulate the features of Snapchat, to create an opportunity for users to share quickly-disappearing photos and videos.

And again, because the focus here is on the visual, you’ll want to prevent distracting viewers from it with too much text.

According to Teen Vogue, Snapchat’s character limit is 80 per post, which is more than double its previous 31-character limit.

And, if you’re looking for more guidance, just look to this particular app’s name, and remember the “snap” element of it — a word that implies brevity — and try not to ramble. Here’s a great example of how SXSW uses its captions efficiently:

7. YouTube

Featured Resource: YouTube for Business – A 30-Day Roadmap

Here we have yet another network that’s focused on visual content, leading some to incorrectly assume that accompanying text — like titles and descriptions — don’t matter as much.

That’s not entirely false — as a video-hosting platform, YouTube should primarily be used to showcase a brand’s quality videos. However, like any other visual content, it needs context. People need to know what they’re watching, who it’s from, and why it matters.

Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t appear to provide any specific parameters over its character counts — except for your channel description, which according to the official help site is limited to 1,000 characters.

But other than that, it seems that the only guideline available is the alert display that lets you know, “Your [title or description] is too long,” if you’ve entered too much text in either of those fields.

In this case, we would advise taking the same approach as adding text to support your visuals on Instagram and Snapchat.

Like the former, a video’s description is cut off after the first line or two, so frontload the most important descriptors and CTAs, leaving extra details for the end.

Show Your Character

As you set out to determine the length of your text, regardless of the platform, remember to do so with the user in mind.

Many of these channel-mandated character limits are established for that reason — to keep audiences from getting bored or overwhelmed.

Like anything else in marketing, however, it’s never an exact science, despite the best data. We encourage you to follow these guidelines, but don’t be afraid to experiment if they don’t always work.

Test different amounts of text within your various channels, and keep track of how each post performs.

From there, you can make decisions about which types of content, as well as its accompanying titles and descriptions, are the most well-received from your audience.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2016 and was updated in December  2019 for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

But what about real-world uses for AI? How can marketers begin to use AI to solve actual problems they have? All the speculation and theory are interesting. But at the end of the day, marketers have KPIs and business goals to meet.

Turns out, there are AI tools that can help you get more readers in several different ways, starting now. Today, we’ll cover which tools can help you grow your blog. But first, let’s explore the benefits of using AI.

The Benefits of Using AI to Grow Your Blog

You want to get more people to read your blog posts. More people reading means more opportunities to convert those readers into prospects.

More prospects mean more opportunities to sell. More sales equal happier executives — which in turn means a happier marketing team.

AI can help you grow your readership so you can keep the engine running. We’ll explore how below.

1. Write better posts.

Better posts equal more engaged readers. Period. But it’s not always easy to improve your writing. AI is here to help.

AI tools can help you check for common spelling and grammar mistakes. Additionally, these tools can help you convey the right tone. The result is writing that captures attention.

2. Blog about what people want to read.

You can write the world’s best post, but it doesn’t matter if it’s on a topic your audience doesn’t care about. How do you find compelling and popular blog topics?

There are a few AI-powered tools that can help with this, too. AI content assistants can help suggests topics and brainstorm outlines for posts. Further, you can use AI-powered SEO tools to help you find opportunities where you can rank highly on search engines.

3. Engage readers more.

Your existing readers may love your content. But how often are they consuming more than one post per session? Are they served fresh content before they leave your site? Most importantly, are they served additional content they actually care about?

Personalization is key to engaging readers and keeping them coming back for more. It’s a scalable way to make sure every blog reader stays on-site longer.

4. Find more readers for your blog.

Aside from creating great content, how do you find more readers? One way is by going to where they congregate online. AI tools can help you pinpoint potential clients and provide you with information about their online gathering spaces.

From there, you can make sure your blog appears in the right places to gain traction.

5. Scale your blog and create more posts.

The more content you can publish, the more eyeballs you’ll get on your blog. This requires you to scale blogging, which can be a challenge. The initial draft of a blog is typically time-consuming. Just the research phase can take around four hours for most writers.

Generative AI can create both outlines for your blog post and the text itself. This allows you to focus your internal writers on more complex stories or on editing the AI’s output.

6. Optimize your content.

HubSpot’s SEO tool uses AI to suggest search optimizations for your blog content, giving you site recommendations ranked by priority and impact. Hubspot’s SEO Marketing Software does the heavy lifting of SEO research for you by giving you content topics that Google users regularly search for.

By optimizing your blog, you can potentially move onto Google’s first page for any given set of keywords.

7. Create royalty-free blog images.

No blog is complete without at least one image. However, stock images blur together, and you may not have the artistic ability (or time) to make beautiful images from scratch. With AI, all you need to do is write a prompt. From there, the algorithm can design the image for you.

Now that we’ve explored how AI can help you level up your blog, let’s discuss the specific tools that can help you grow.

12 Essential AI Tools for Bloggers

1. Content Assistant From HubSpot

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HubSpot’s content assistant tools can help write copy fast. The assistant uses generative AI to help write the text for blog posts, landing pages, newsletters, and more.

Not ready to have AI do all the writing? The content assistant tool can also generate blog post ideas and outlines for your work. You can still write the bulk of your text yourself, but you’ll always have a clear plan to follow.

Remember: Artificial Intelligence can’t fully replace the entire job of a content writer, but by creating the first draft, your writers can focus their energy on other projects such as web content, SEO, internal needs such as sales collateral or product needs, and more.

Price: Free.

Best for: Writing blog posts.

What we love: Your blog post needs to target the right keywords to gain traction. Content assistant can help you optimize your text for SEO so you can build your audience.

2. ChatGPT

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Tools like ChatGPT can help you with the content-writing aspect of a blog. This AI tool uses natural language processing (NLP) to help craft new written content from scratch. You can ask the interface to gather research for your writing or generate the text itself.

However, make sure you’re aware of ChatGPT’s limitations. For example, its AI references content published in and before 2021. If you’re writing about something current, this tool will be out-of-date.

Price: ChatGPT is currently free. Plus plans start at $20 per month.

Best for: Writing blog posts.

Pro tip: ChatGPT requires very specific instructions. You’ll need to practice writing the best prompts to make the most of this tool.

3. ChatSpot

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Let’s say you’re publishing a report or blog post that requires data from your CRM. ChatSpot is here to help. This tool integrates with your HubSpot CRM, so you can gather and interact with your data entirely with chat-based commands.

ChatSpot also provides a long-form content-writing feature that can generate draft blog posts to streamline your content creation process.

Price: Free.

Best for: Writing and researching blog posts.

What we love: If asked the right questions, ChatSpot can help you research the blog post topics you want to cover.

4. Uberflip

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Uberflip uses AI to streamline the content creation process and enhance the reader experience. The tool catalogs the topics you’ve written about. Then, it recommends content to visitors based on what they’ve already read on your site.

By leveraging Uberflip’s personalization feature, you can tailor your blog content to different audience segments, ensuring that each reader receives content that meets their needs.

Price: Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Promoting blog posts.

What we love: Uberflip can help you create a centralized content library that showcases all your blog posts. This ensures that readers can easily navigate across your content.

5. Crayon

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Crayon uses AI to give you intelligence on what competitors are doing online. The tool analyzes over 100 different types of data online from seven million sources. It tracks changes to competitor websites over time and uses AI to display the most meaningful insights from competitor activity.

These insights reveal much about a company’s messaging and content strategy. That gives smart marketers lots of material for their own blogging.

You might also combine Crayon with HubSpot’s Content Strategy tool. The Content Strategy tool uses AI to help marketers discover new content ideas. You’ll get suggestions on topic clusters to pursue. You can also determine which opportunities are worth spending time writing about.

Price: Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Monitoring competitors.

What we love: You can determine what topics matter most to audiences and where gaps exist to fill with your own content.

6. Pathmatics

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Pathmatics uses AI to show you digital advertising information for hundreds of brands. You can see how much a brand has spent on ads and which campaigns its run.

Most importantly, you can see where the brand advertisers are. This information can tell you where audiences like yours hang out online.

For instance, you could use Pathmatics to see where your competitors advertise most. From there, pick top industry sites that align with your blogging. Voila! You have some good ideas on who to pitch for your guest posting strategy.

Price: Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Monitoring competitors.

What we love: With Pathmatics, you can see side-by-side competitor comparisons and channel views.

7. BrightEdge

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BrightEdge’s suite of AI-first products makes content production a lot easier. On one hand, the company’s solution automates production tasks. Say goodbye to tedious things like adding header tags, cross-linking, and optimization.

On the other, BrightEdge will tell you which types of content may perform well for your brand. That saves you a ton of time and increases confidence in the ROI of blogging efforts. BrightEdge can also recommend ways to rank your content and keep readers engaged.

Price: Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Building your strategy.

What we love: BrightEdge can help you find gaps in your content library, so you can cover all your bases and become a one-stop-shop for readers.

8. Surfer

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You can leverage tools like Surfer to get a comprehensive content score, so you can easily determine how optimized any given piece of content is. This AI tool can also generate catchy H1s and H2s, giving your content writers a general structure to go off of.

Surfer also gives you a plagiarism checker. Google will penalize any content that it identifies as being stolen from other websites.

Even if you don’t use the other features of Surfer, this is a great Chrome extension for ensuring you don’t accidentally copy anyone’s writing.

Price: Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Optimizing content.

What we love: Surfer analyzes your competitor’s content and suggests improvements to make your content more relevant. With Surfer’s help, you can find target keywords, meta tags, and more.

9. Acrolinx

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If you’re an enterprise looking to scale your blogging, Acrolinx is worth a look. Acrolinx has AI read and analyze your content. Then, AI uses what it learns to make sure everyone follows brand standards and guidelines.

No matter how many writers you have across the world, they’ll stay on the same page. All posts are on-brand and follow your style criteria exactly. That frees up a lot of time normally spent tweaking, formatting, and editing for consistency.

Price: Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Editing content.

What we love: Acrolinx does the tedious task of enforcing style consistency so you can spend more time on high-quality blogging.

10. Grammarly

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Grammarly is a tool that uses AI to recommend better writing. It can tell you your grammar mistakes and how to fix them. It can also offer powerful recommendations to improve your tone and style.

For an individual blog writer, it’s a critical tool to stay at the top of your game. For teams, it can transform the quality and effectiveness of your entire blog.

Price: A free version is available. Paid plans start at $12 a month.

Best for: Editing content.

What we love: Grammarly offers tone suggestions so you can make sure your writing matches your intended message.

11. Fotor

Image Source

Using an AI image tool like Fotor can help you save money on stock images while generating exactly what you want for your blog. Fotor can create art in different styles such as 3D, realistic, oil painting, cartoon, illustration, photography, and more.

New users can get up to ten pictures a day, making Fotor free to use on a small scale.

Price: Paid plans start at $4.99 monthly.

Best for: Image generation.

What we love: Fotor’s AI algorithm can analyze the user’s design history and offer suggestions, helping users make design choices that match their style and preferences.

12. Night Cafe

Image Source

Night Cafe’s AI can analyze vast amounts of image data to understand object placement, colors, and other visual elements. This understanding enables its AI to generate new images based on this existing data.

Night Cafe uses a credit system for image generation, meaning you can participate in the online community to get credits or purchase them.

Price: A 100-credit-a-month plan costs $4.79.

Best for: Image generation.

Pro tip: Don’t forget to add valuable image alt text to any image you add to your blog, so your blog can be fully optimized.

Getting Started

AI in marketing is growing fast. Leveraging new tools can help you increase your blog output, find the right audience, and optimize content for search.

Fail to make the most of the opportunity, and your site will fall behind. So start experimenting with AI tools to see what works best for your team.

Google’s local algorithm demands different tactics for link building. And even if you don’t need local SEO, local link building strategies can still give you a different perspective and improve your work. In today’s episode, Greg walks you through some of these strategies.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

♪ [music] ♪ Howdy, Moz fans. I’m Greg Gifford, the COO of SearchLab Digital, and I’m back to do another Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re talking tactics for local links. Get it, huh? The important thing to remember is that Google’s local algorithm is different, so you need to approach local link building differently.

Even if you don’t need local SEO, local link-building tactics can still give you a different perspective, and we all know that with a different perspective, you can do better work. Whoa. So the most important thing to understand is that the best links are based on relationships that you have in the real world. They’re easier to get and they’re more powerful.

The other thing to remember is the easiest way to get local links is to turn the clock back and do the things that businesses used to do to get exposure in the local community that everybody kind of stopped doing once we had the internet. So if you just get involved in the local community, you’ll naturally acquire a lot of amazing local links. Remember checklist link building rarely works.

That’s not what I wrote, but I wasn’t watching. But yeah, checklist link building doesn’t really work. You have to be original. You need unique links to win so that you’ve got links that your competitors don’t have. So don’t follow a checklist. Think outside the box. Be creative.

So a couple of ideas and tactics that I want to run you through. Sponsorships are great. Now, also I should remind you Google is basically pattern detection. So most importantly, remember that when you look at your link profile, you can’t just do one or two things. You have to have a natural mix. But with sponsorships, a lot of people avoid them because they think that you’re really buying links because obviously buying links is bad.

But Google is totally okay with you buying a sponsorship that results in a link. So Little League, peewee hockey, peewee football, 5Ks, golf tournaments, these are all great things that a lot of businesses are already doing. So find those easy, cheap, awesome local sponsorship opportunities. Knock those out.

Charities are great too. So you’re not sponsoring an event, you’re giving money or donating time to a local charity. That’s an awesome link opportunity as well. Volunteer opportunities are great as well. You know, you’re taking your team down to feed the homeless at the soup kitchen or anything like that, or highway clean-ups. Things like that are awesome local link opportunities. Local meetups are one of my favorite things to do.

So you want to go to a site like meetup.com, and there’s a couple of different tactics you can use here. First of all, if you’ve got some sort of a meeting room or a board room, conference room kind of situation and you’re not using it all the time, go on meetup.com, look for local groups that have meetings on a regular basis. Let’s say the group has a meeting on the second Monday of every month at 7:00 p.m. but your office is closed at 6:00.

So you could offer them your conference room or your meeting area. They’ve got free Wi-Fi, they’ve got an awesome big TV they can connect to and etc., and cool, boom, you get a local link out of it. Now, if you don’t have a space that you can offer to those local groups, again get on meetup.com or Facebook groups or whatever and look for local groups that are looking for meeting sponsors. Forty, fifty, sixty bucks a month buys their soft drinks and their snacks, and killer local links come right your way.

Blogs are great too. Find the local bloggers and get them to write about you. Now, obviously, the blog is going to say, “Hey, I was given a free widget to write about Greg’s widget company,” but who cares? You still get an awesome link from a local blogger, and even if it’s something that seems like it may not be related to what you do, it’s still okay because that blogger is in the local area.

So even if it’s a food blogger or a travel blogger and you give them a free widget to talk about your widget company, doesn’t matter. You still get an awesome local link. Local business associations, it’s a no-brainer. Better Business Bureau is an amazing one. In fact, Google has just added the Better Business Bureau link into your verification process if you’re trying to get reinstated in your Google Business profile.

But that’s a whole nother Whiteboard Friday that we’ll cover later. But join all of those local business associations. They’re a no-brainer. Local business directories, couldn’t fit that in there, but local business directories are great as well. Join all of them that you can. Even if it’s a little bit of a fee to join that business directory, it’s still a really killer list of really relevant local links. Local calendar pages are another thing that a lot of businesses don’t really think about.

There are always different websites or organizations in the local area, and a lot of times it’s the city government site or local newspaper or TV that has a calendar page of just community events and you can’t get on there if you don’t have something event worthy. But if you’ve got a sales event or a barbecue or some sort of a cookout like that, you get a local link back to your site.

You also want to think outside the box. Don’t do the same thing that everybody else does. You don’t do the same SEO for every client, so you shouldn’t do the same link building for every client. So a couple of outside-the-box things. If you work with car dealerships or pediatricians or even personal injury attorneys, child seat installation is a killer tactic.

You can have the staff of that location go to a two-day safety course. You can sign up at cert.safekids.org. I didn’t have room to get it all on there. But you sit through the safety class and then you are officially certified to be a place that anyone in the community can come for free to get their child seat installed correctly.

Because guess what, 99% of us are installing our child seats incorrectly. So if there was an accident, our kids would get injured. So this really makes sense if it’s something related to kids or if it’s something like personal injury or doctors, really killer. If the business owner or leadership of the business is a member of a certain ethnic group, there are ethnic business directories in every city in the country.

So let’s say you have an Iranian dry cleaner. I’m pulling that out of the air. There will be a list of Iranian-owned businesses in that area. You can get on that list, and the competitors can’t. It’s killer. Or if someone is LGBTQIA+, that’s a link you can get that again competitors can’t get, and there are LGBTQIA+ directories in every city that you can get on.

So go look for those if it’s applicable to your business. This last one is a really kind of wacky one that people don’t really understand the first time I mention it. This isn’t about the clubs and organizations that your business is a member of. You want to talk to the staff at your client’s business or at your business if you’re in-house, especially leadership of the organization, and find out what they’re passionate about.

What do they do in their free time that they really enjoy doing? What are their hobbies? Because if they’re a member of a local club or organization, especially if they’re so involved in that club or organization that they’re on the leadership board of that organization, guess what, it’s going to be super easy to get your business linked from that business’ website.

This one here, a lot of people are going to laugh at this because it’s an old-school technique, but it really works. If you periodically, I’m not saying every week, but periodically you write a local informational blog post of like, “Hey, our staff loves to go out and grab barbecue every Friday and here are the five best barbecue places in Dallas, according to our staff,” once you’ve got that blog post up, you can then do outreach to each of those five locations and say, “Hey, we listed you as one of the five best places in Dallas.”

Even if it’s not related to the business, this is the kind of stuff that shows up in search results. So you get surfaced and you get eyeballs on your business. So it’s great for branding. It’s kind of that billboard effect, and it gets killer links. The really awesome part that people don’t really think about is most of the time, when you’re getting these links, you’re dealing with people that aren’t that technically savvy.

So yeah, sure, the people that are technically savvy are going to link to that specific local blog post. But the people that aren’t, they’re going to link to your homepage. So it’s really killer. So a cool story because everybody that knows me knows I’m a story guy. Several years ago, I was speaking at a conference in Vegas and a lawyer came up and he said, “Hey, man, I know a lot about SEO and I need your help.”

I said, “Okay, let me help you.” He said, “I’ve got three times as many links as this other attorney in town, yet he outranks me on every single query possible.” I said, “Okay.” The guy again said, “I know SEO, so I should be winning.” Well, obviously there’s a lot more than just links at play. So what I did, I built a little spreadsheet and I graphed out the link profile of this guy versus his competitor based on Domain Authority.

Stick with me, though. It doesn’t matter how many links they had, it’s just based on the authority. So we see here the guy in red is the guy that I was talking to. So the guy in red has three times as many links as the guy in blue. So when I graph it out, this one right here is Domain Authority of above 50. This one right here is Domain Authority of 11 to 50, and this one right here is Domain Authority below 10.

You can see 67% of the guy in blue links are above a 50, and 53% or almost 60% of the guy in red who was the guy asking me for help was below 50. I said, “All right, there’s a story here. Let’s break it down a little bit more.” So this is 91 to 100. This is 71 to 90, 51 to 70, 26 to 50, and 0 to 25.

You can see right here that almost a massive section, like 65% of the guy in blue links are above Domain Authority of 7 versus 60% basically of the guy in red that is really low, below a DA of 50. Now, the guy in red wasn’t doing local SEO.

Even though the guy in red had three times as many links, they all skewed towards the bottom of the authority range because he was getting really horrible links from like seodirectory.com and linksxyz.com, and stupid things like that that wouldn’t matter. The important thing to understand is if the guy in red had been doing local SEO and getting local links, this graph would look the same way because local links skew towards lower authority.

But the guy in red would have been destroying the guy in blue if he’d been getting local links. So that’s the way that you need to change your perspective and think about it differently. If you’d like to do something similar yourself, you can do exactly the same thing with my Badass Link Worksheet. You can download it right here at bit.ly/gregs-bad-ass-link-sheet. That is all lowercase when you type it in.

So make sure you do that, or I’m sure they’ll drop it down in the blog post or in the comments so that you can click on it there. You can download that sheet. It’s an Excel spreadsheet. It does have macros enabled to basically make it easy to clear information out. It’s set to work with your Moz link export. You need last month’s link export, this month’s link export, and your competitor’s link export for this month.

You drop those in, automatically it’s going to graph out all of this stuff. On another tab, it’s going to give you a list of all of the link gap opportunities where your competitors have links and you don’t. Then on another tab, it’s going to give you a list of all the links that you’ve lost since the last time you did it. Now, yeah, there’s some link tools out there that do it too, but this is a really easy tool.

It’s super killer, and I’m sharing it with you guys today for free. Thank you so much for watching my newest episode of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

UTM codes help you track where traffic is coming from, allowing you to properly measure each campaign’s, platform’s, or medium’s ROI.

In this blog post, you’ll learn what UTM codes are, how to use them, and how to build them in both Google Analytics and HubSpot.

UTM codes are also known as UTM parameters — or tracking tags — because they help you “track” website traffic from its origin. Marketers customize this text to match the webpage the tagged URL is linked on, in order to attribute the success of that campaign to specific pieces of content.

Now, you might be thinking, “Ginny, I have HubSpot, so I already know if my website traffic is coming from Google, email, social media, and similar marketing channels. What does a UTM code tell me that I don’t already know?”

HubSpot Marketing Hub provides you with these high-level sources of traffic, but UTM also helps you drill down into specific pages and posts within these traffic sources. If you’re promoting a campaign on social media, for example, you’ll know how much traffic came from social media. Building a UTM code, however, can tell you how much of that traffic came from Facebook or even a particular post on Facebook.

UTM Code Example

UTM codes can be overwhelming at first, so let’s take a look at an example. Here’s a URL with its own UTM code:

http://blog.hubspot.com/9-reasons-you-cant-resist-list?utm_campaign=blog_post &utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Let’s break this link down.

• http://blog.hubspot.com/9-reasons-you-cant-resist-list: This is the base URL of the page.
• ?: This signals to your analytics software that a string of UTM parameters will follow.
• utm_campaign=blog_post: This is the first UTM parameter, specifically for the campaign the visitor engaged with (in this case, a blog post campaign).
• &: This denotes that another UTM parameter will follow.
• utm_medium=social: This is the second parameter, specifically for the channel the visitor came from (in this case, social).
• &: This denotes that another UTM parameter will follow.
• utm_source=facebook: This is the last parameter, specifically for the specific website the visitor came from (in this case, Facebook).

In the example above, you’re saying that once traffic comes in from people who click this link, the traffic should be attributed to Facebook. The “medium” is social media, while the “source” is Facebook.

Adding these snippets of code after the question mark above doesn’t affect anything on the page — it just lets your analytics program know that someone arrived through a certain source inside an overall marketing channel, as part of a specific campaign.

UTM Code Benefits

As we’ve already covered, UTM codes are small snippets of code that you can add to the end of a URL to track where website traffic is coming from. They may seem small, but they bring big benefits to marketers. Here are just a few:

• Better tracking: UTM codes allow you to track exactly where your website traffic is coming from, so you can see which marketing tactics are actually driving results. With UTM codes, you can see which sources, mediums, and campaigns are bringing in the most traffic, leads, and sales.
• More accurate attribution: UTM codes also allow you to give credit where credit is due. For example, if a visitor first finds your website through a Google search, then comes back later through a Facebook ad, you can see the entire customer journey and attribute the sale or conversion to both channels.

In summary, UTM codes are a simple but powerful way to get more insight into your website traffic and marketing campaigns. They allow you to track sources and mediums more accurately, and give you a clear picture of which channels are driving the most value for your business. By using UTM codes consistently, you’ll be able to make smarter marketing decisions and optimize your campaigns for better results.

With that, let’s dive more deeply into the ways UTM code links help marketers accurately attribute lead sources.

How do UTM links help marketers?

Crucial aspects of being a great marketer are being able to measure your success and measure your impact. No matter which metrics you use, you want to prove to your boss (and the company) that you’re worth your salt.

You deserve your budget — and maybe need more of it — and you deserve to dedicate time to the marketing activities that work. Building UTM codes that track your campaigns’ success is the best way to prove it.

Relying on your analytics tool’s source and medium breakdown isn’t enough to prove whether a certain strategy is working. UTM links provide more granular data that allow you to drill down to the specific source of the traffic. You can use the following UTM parameters, which we’ll cover in more detail later:

• Campaign
• Source
• Medium
• Content
• Term

With that in mind, UTM tracking codes can help you determine:

1. Where the traffic is coming from (Source).

First up, you’ll be able to tell the specific website the traffic is coming from. Examples include:

• Social websites (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc)
• Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc)
• Paid posts and sponsored listings (paid ads, sponsored posts, etc)
• Other websites (your own site, competitor’s sites, publisher’s sites)

2. Which general channel the traffic came from (Medium).

It’s also important to know the general categorization of the source. That way, you can determine whether social media in general is a worthwhile investment, as an example. Organic search, social, CPC, and email are a few mediums you can use.

3. What type of content people clicked on (Content).

What gets the most clicks? An image, a sidebar link, or a menu link? You can tell this information with the content UTM parameter. This is essential for determining whether you need to add more images, for instance, or improve your sidebar link structure if no clicks are coming through that content.

4. Which term they used to access the page (Term).

UTM links can also help you see which terms are driving traffic to a specific page. By using the term parameter, you can determine which keywords are driving the most traffic to you, and which need more love.

Putting it all together, here’s what a UTM-tracked URL can look like:

blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-are-utm-tracking-codes-ht?utm_medium=paid&utm_source=google&utm_content=sponsored_ad&utm_term=utm+codes

Now, let’s take a closer look at the definition of UTM tracking and the UTM parameters you can use.

UTM Parameter Examples

UTM codes can track a medium and a source within that medium. Where it gets more flexible is in the language you use to describe that source. Maybe you want to attribute website traffic to a social network, a type of content, or even the exact name of an advertisement on the web.

Here are the five things you can track with UTM codes and why you might track them:

1. Campaign

Campaign-based tracking tags group all of the content from one campaign in your analytics. The example UTM code below would help you attribute website traffic to links that were placed as a part of a 20% discount promotion you’re hosting.

Example: utm_campaign=20_off

2. Source

A source-based URL parameter can tell you which website is sending you traffic. You could add the example code below to every link you post to your Facebook page, helping you to track all traffic that comes from Facebook.

Example: utm_source=facebook

3. Medium

This type of tracking tag informs you of the medium that your tracked link is featured in. You can use the example UTM code below to track all traffic that comes from social media (as opposed to other mediums, like email).

Example: utm_medium=social_media

4. Piece of Content

This type of UTM code is used to track the specific types of content that point to the same destination from a common source and medium.

It’s often used in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns or with two identical links on the same page, as shown in the sample UTM code below.

Example: utm_content=sidebar_link or utm_content=header_link

5. Term

A term- or keyword-based tracking code identifies the keywords you’ve paid for in a PPC ad. If you pay for a Google Ads campaign to rank under the keyword, “marketing software,” you might add the following UTM code to the end of the link you submit to Google to run this ad.

Example: utm_term=marketing+software

The best part about UTM parameters is that you can make any combination you like of these codes — use the bare minimum (campaign, source, and medium) to track all of your links, or use all of them to get super specific about your tracking.

Okay, so you’re on board with UTM codes … but how the heck do you set them up? It’s easy.

Below are instructions for setting up and measuring UTM parameters in Google Analytics and HubSpot.

How to Build UTM Codes in Google Analytics

Here are the steps involved in building UTM codes in Google Analytics.

1. Open Google’s Campaign URL Builder.

There are three different types of tracking tags you can create in Google, two of which help you track traffic to new apps on app marketplaces. You’ll be using the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder — the third option on this list.

2. Fill in each link attribute in the following form.

Visit the page linked above and click the link to see this URL builder. Then, you’ll see the UTM builder shown below. Add the URL, Campaign, Source, and Medium information into their respective boxes.

3. Use the link in your marketing campaign.

If you’d like to shorten it, you’ll need a tool like bit.ly … or just use HubSpot’s URL Builder if you’re a HubSpot customer.

4. Measure your success.

If you already have Google Analytics set up for your site, Google will automatically track incoming campaigns. Like in HubSpot, you can access them under “Audience,” then “Sources,” then “Campaigns.” Click on each campaign to view the source and medium.

And that’s it — you’ll have custom tracking codes set up and running in no time! In a few weeks, you’ll be able to make a case for what you need because you’ll have the right metrics available.

How to Build UTM Codes in HubSpot

Here’s how you’d go about building UTM codes in HubSpot.

1. Navigate to your Analytics Tools.

In your Marketing Hub dashboard, select “Reports” on the top navigation bar. Then select “Analytics Tools” in the dropdown, as shown below.

2. Open the Tracking URL Builder.

In the menu of analytics tools that appears, look to the very bottom-righthand corner. You’ll see the option, “Tracking URL Builder.” Click this option at the bottom of the page, as shown in the red box below.

3. Open the Tracking URL form to create a new UTM code.

Whenever you create a web campaign that includes at least one UTM code, you’ll see this campaign listed on the page shown below.

This page outlines a tracking tag’s source, medium, term, content, and creation date, which you can see along the bottom of the screenshot below. Click “Create Tracking URL” in the top-righthand corner.

4. Fill in each attribute of your UTM code and click “Create.”

In the form that appears, fill in the URL, Campaign, Source, and Medium fields. If you’d like to add Content and Term, you can do so in the bottom two fields of this form. When you’re done, you’ll see an orange “Create” button become available at the bottom.

Click it, and HubSpot will log your UTM code as a new campaign, and this link will be ready to include on any webpage from which you want to track the traffic.

5. Use the shortened link in your marketing campaign.

6. Measure your success.

You can track your UTM parameters in your Traffic Analytics dashboard under “Other Campaigns,” as shown below. Click on the individual campaign to break down the source and medium.

As you can see in the second image, below, the name of the campaign appears to the left — based on the text in the UTM code you created — with the traffic from people who used each URL to arrive at your campaign’s main webpage.

Now that you know how to set up UTM links, how do you use them? Let’s take a look.

How to Use UTM Links for Your Campaigns

You can use a combination of UTM codes and parameters in a lot of ways. Here’s how you can use them in your day-to-day as a marketer.

1. Track the success of a promotional campaign.

Dropping product prices or launching a new product can be daunting, because if there’s no measurable ROI, it’ll be wasted effort. Luckily, you can tell whether users are effectively arriving to your site from your promotional efforts using UTM codes.

Here’s one example for a product launch:

mywebsite.com/new-product?utm_campaign=product_launch&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=facebook

Or, if you’re running a discount campaign through Instagram influencers, here’s what a UTM link can look like:

mywebsite.com/sale?utm_campaign=20_off&utm_medium=paid&utm_source=instagram&utm_content=bio

2. See how well your social channels promote your content versus when your followers promote your content.

How do your organic social efforts stack up against your followers’ promotional efforts? You can create two UTM campaigns to find out.

For your own posts, you can share a link as follows:

mywebsite.com?utm_campaign=inhouse_social&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=post

Then, prompt your followers to share the word about you, but let them share the following link:

mywebsite.com?utm_campaign=followers&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=post

3. Measure the effectiveness of guest posting referral traffic.

If you’re guest posting on several industry websites, it’s essential to know whether those posts are driving traffic to your site. Guest posting can be a time-consuming, costly endeavor, especially if you’re paying a freelance writer or for a spot on the publication.

Whenever you create a guest post for another publisher, ensure all the links pointing to your website on that post have UTM parameters that tell you where the traffic came from. Here’s one example:

mywebsite.com?utm_campaign=guest_post&utm_medium=paid&utm_source=guest_post_site&utm_content=body

4. Track the same piece of content across multiple marketing channels.

This is probably one of the most useful ways to use UTM tracking codes: Creating different ones for the same piece of content, and using it across different platforms. You can drop the campaign parameter for this use case, and simply track the medium, source, and content.

Let’s say you want to track referral traffic from a video you posted on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. Here are the three different links you could use:

LinkedIn: mywebsite.com/my-content?utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin&utm_content=caption
YouTube: mywebsite.com/my-content?utm_medium=social&utm_source=youtube&utm_content=description
Facebook: mywebsite.com/my-content?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=caption

5. See where most people click on your internal links in a blog post.

Is your internal linking strategy working as intended? You can track where your content gets the most clicks by adding UTM parameters. Here are three examples:

Image: mywebsite.com/my-content?utm_source=blog&utm_content=image
Above the Fold: mywebsite.com/my-content?utm_source=blog&utm_content=above_the_fold
Bottom of the Post:mywebsite.com/my-content?utm_source=blog&utm_content=bottom

Note: Use this strategy with caution, as using too many UTM parameters in internal links can cause confusion to Google. You should use it on a small batch of internal links, collect the clicking patterns, delete the UTM links, and then act on those results for your future internal linking efforts.

As always, ensure that you’ve set a canonical URL for each link to minimize confusion and prevent duplicate indexing.

UTM Tracking Best Practices

UTM tracking URLs are a powerful marketing tool, but to get the most out of them, it’s important to follow some best practices. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1. Create consistent UTM tracking codes.

Make sure your URLs and links are consistent, clean, and easy to read. I’d even recommend creating a standard for link tagging, or a UTM parameter guide (kind of like a brand style guide) to ensure consistency across platforms and campaigns.

For example, for monthly newsletters, you might choose to always input the “utm_medium=email” in the medium parameter and use the “utm_campaign=monthly_newsletters” in the campaign parameter.

Then, for all Facebook posts, you would always use “utm_medium=social” in the medium parameter and “utm_source=facebook” in the source parameter. Same for paid ads: You would always opt for “utm_medium=cpc” in the medium parameter and “utm_source=google” in the source parameter.

By using the same UTM parameters for similar campaigns, you can ensure that all data is accurate and easy to analyze when it’s time to calculate your ROI and put together marketing reports. This allows you to make data-driven decisions about which campaigns are most effective.

2. Capitalize your UTM codes carefully, or not at all.

UTM codes are case-sensitive, so stick with either all lowercase or uppercase. Lower case is easier to remember, because that way you don’t have to wonder whether only the first letter or the whole parameter is capitalized.

It’s not just beneficial for remembering your UTM tags easily. Having a standardized way of tagging your links makes it much easier to review and analyze your overall marketing efforts.

Plus, you’ll avoid annoying discrepancies in your website analytics. Inconsistent capitalization can create duplicate entries or split data across different channels, making your data difficult to analyze.

With consistent capitalization, you can more accurately monitor and analyze the performance of your UTM-tagged links, improving reporting across all campaigns and channels.

3. Keep names short but descriptive.

When creating UTM parameters, make the names short but descriptive. That way, your UTM codes are easier to read and remember. They also take up less space in blog posts and social media updates, ultimately making the links look clean, attractive, and professional.

But the most important benefit is that you can avoid any confusion or mix-ups between campaigns with similar names. Clear and concise UTM codes can make it easier to differentiate between similar campaigns, which is especially critical if your team runs a large volume. You really want to be specific with your parameters so your tags clearly state what you’re tracking and where.

For instance, let’s say you’re launching a new ebook as part of an email marketing campaign. A short but descriptive UTM code for this campaign might look like this:

https://www.yourwebsite.com/ebook-title?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ebook-launch

In this example, we have used short, but meaningful names as UTM parameters. You can’t possibly get confused — unless you’re launching two ebooks at the same time. (In which case, you might differentiate your UTM parameters with each book’s name!)

4. Keep a running list of your UTM links in an accessible location.

Creating yet another spreadsheet may make you cringe, but hunting down a wide variety of UTM-tracked links is what’s sure to give you a headache. Keep a list of your UTM links so everyone on your team knows which tagged links currently exist.

I recommend maintaining your list on a cloud-based platform such as Google Sheets (as opposed to keeping it in a local Excel file), then splitting the links by campaign or platform. That way, it’s easier to see all of your links depending on your preferred categorization.

Having a running list will also prevent your team from creating duplicate UTM codes for the same campaign, which can skew your analytics data and create unnecessary confusion. With a running list, everyone on your team will have an easy reference point to ensure they are using correct UTM codes for new campaigns.

You’ll also be able to manage and maintain the codes themselves, which is critical when campaigns are changed or discontinued. In your spreadsheet, you can easily update, modify, or delete UTM tracking codes as needed.

5. Connect UTM tracking codes to your CRM or marketing tool.

Adding your UTM tracking URLs to your CRM or marketing tool is essential. (If you’re not sure of what that can look like, here’s an example of how to do it in HubSpot.) By doing so, you’ll be able to better understand the customer journey, accurately attribute sales and conversions, and make decisions based on data.

Taking this step may feel unnecessary, but linking your UTM codes to your CRM will allow you to better track the customer journey from first-touch to conversion. By tracking which campaigns and channels drive the most website traffic, you gain a better understanding of which of your marketing efforts effectively reach and engage your audience.

As a result, you’ll be able to identify trends, assess performance over time, and make informed decisions based on the success of past campaigns.

Start Creating UTM Tracking URLs

Use the steps, best practices, and tools above to start creating and using UTM tracking URLs so you’re able to track the performance of your marketing campaigns and content. That way, you can reliably boost your metrics and improve the ROI of your digital marketing strategy.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in September 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.