UTM and CTR tell you almost nothing

I get at least 2 questions a week about these KPIs, so I want to open them up a little.

Steam gives you UTM deeplinking, but it works almost nowhere except Reddit, Discord and Twitter. On Instagram and TikTok there are no links in posts, so most players find the game by searching for it instead of tapping the link in the bio. On Twitter, unless it is paid ads, Twitter is allergic to links in general, and if you put the link in the post itself it limits your reach, so you have to put it in the first comment. Even then, more people come by searching the game’s name than through that first comment.

The only places where UTM can be trusted are your own backlinks and Reddit, and Reddit only if the subreddit allows it. Even if you send press and influencers a link with UTM on it, they usually use the plain Steam link. Do not get into things like Linktree either, because every kind of friction loses you almost 90% of the players you already had.

The vast majority of players see you on mobile or on external sites, so they are not logged into Steam. If they like it, they either open the app, search for it and reach the page that way, or they come when they sit down at a PC and happen to remember. That player is nowhere in your UTM report, not even in Total Visits, because Total Visits only counts visits with a UTM code attached. You only see them in your general store traffic, and you never find out where they came from. For a visit to count as tracked, the user has to be logged in. In this loop there is almost no way to build a lossless attribution funnel like the one you get on mobile, and Valve itself admits as much.

There is also the conversion window, 72 hours. It counts what happens in the three days after the click. But that is not the whole job of a wishlist, the player wishlists it and buys it months later in a sale. That sale is credited to no campaign at all.

In practice this means one thing. A UTM report cannot answer the question “did this campaign work”. The only question it can answer is which of two campaigns set up the same way did better. It has no absolute value, only comparative value, so you always need a reference measurement to put next to it.

The second number people read wrong is the click-through rate, CTR. The definition is simple, your page views divided by your capsule impressions. But once you look at the definition of an impression, the ratio is crippled before it starts.

Valve defines an impression as your game appearing on a screen, and its own documentation says this does not guarantee the player saw it, only that it was on the screen. So the player who scrolls past fast is written down as an impression for you. On top of that, some of the impressions it counts do not even lead to your store page, like the notification in a friend list when your friend launches your game. Valve itself writes that clicks cannot be measured for those. Your traffic data is sitting there with impressions in it that cannot be clicked and cannot be separated out.

And there is this, a game with little traffic comes out with a high ratio, because the only people seeing it are already interested or already sold. When Steam likes you and starts showing you to a wide audience, the ratio drops, because it has started putting you in front of a more general crowd.

Zukowski puts it plainly, you do not want a high CTR, because it probably means Steam is not showing you.

So the two numbers break in opposite directions. UTM shows less than what actually happened, and CTR gets worse as things get better. Both of them only mean something to you if you have reference values, and those reference values go stale almost daily.

So what do you look at? Not the ratio, the absolute numbers. How many impressions you got, how many page views there were, and how many wishlists come in per week. These three move together, and when you really grow, all three grow. The graphs for total visits and wishlists usually run parallel to each other.

For weekly wishlists, the median across the games Zukowski scanned came out at 23 wishlists a week. Games making under 10k dollars sit between 0 and 40 a week, games making between 250k and 1 million sit between 100 and 700. If you want to place yourself somewhere, look here, but it is still not definitive.

I am not saying drop UTM entirely, set it up and use it, but use it knowing what it is. Steam is not telling you what you did, it is telling you how much of it it could see.