Welcome to Part 8 where we’ll look at the Google Analytics campaign tracking. You can find the previous chapters of the guide here:
1. Google Tag Manager
2. Tracking code
3. Check the implementation
4. Profiles and filters
5. Settings
6. Goals setup
7. Virtual pageviews and events
8. Campaign tracking
It’s very important to track all of your campaigns so you can attribute traffic properly. With campaign tracking you add parameters to your URL which are variable-value pairs and contain the campaign information you define for source, medium, campaign, term and content. You can either write them manually or use Google URL builder to build them for you. Your tagged URL will look like this:
http://www.domain.com/landing-page.html?utm_source=mashable&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=July_720x90
where “mashable is our source, “banner” is the medium and “July_720x90” is our descriptive campaign name. Be careful when naming your values, because Google Analytics is case sensitive and will treat “banner” and “Banner” as two separate mediums.
Here’s a list of campaigns you should track:
- Bing cpc campaigns or advertising on other networks – you should manually tag your Bing cpc campaigns (for example http://www.domain.com/landing-page.html?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=my-search-campaign and if you don’t use the free Bing ads auto-tagging tool by Bizible) and your advertising campaigns on other ad networks.
- Social media links – you can use for source facebook, twitter, gplus, for medium social or sm (for social media), and for campaign the content you’re sharing like blog-post-name, button (if you track social media sharing buttons on your site).
- Email marketing – it’s very important to track all email communication because usually the visits from clicks in emails are considered direct visits.
- Software – if you sell some kind of software it’s very useful to track clicks from your trials or downloadable versions, because otherwise they will be counted as direct visits as well.
- Whitepapers / PDF files – don’t forget to tag all links you have in your whitepapers and ebooks so you know your content marketing is resulting in visits and conversions.
- Videos – if you have a Youtube branded channel and use annotations linking to your website, don’t leave these links untagged.
Go to the next chapters of the guide:
9. Advanced segments and custom reports. Dashboards.
10. Custom alerts
Or jump to the whole thing: Google Analytics Implementation Guide.
Still have questions? You can ask them as comments below and I’ll try to answer.
Margarita Evtimova
Margarita Evtimova is a Google Analytics fan, who also loves SEO, conversion optimization, online marketing and social media. You can follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.