BIZ OWNERS
arnold on Oct 28, 2018
In Module 3 & 4 of Google Analytics you learned a little bit about measuring custom campaigns and how to build URL’s to track campaigns.
I want to break that down into simpler terms to help make it a little easier to understand and let you get a little bit of practice with the tool.
To start…we know that Google Analytics can track how people come to your website. If someone found your website through a Google search, they would be recorded as an organic visitor. If you posted a link to your website on your company Facebook page and someone clicked on that link and visited your website, then that person would be logged as a referral visitor or Social Media visitor.
But let’s say we get about 150 to 200 visitors a month from our Facebook page. If we launched a month long campaign on Facebook where people could visit our website to print a 20% off coupon and we had 210 Facebook visitors that month, how do we know if it was it a successful campaign or not? Did the campaign result in 10 new visitors or 60?
It would be hard to tell because we already had a lot of referral traffic from Facebook and we don’t know if it was a slower month or busier month for regular Facebook visitors.
Using The Campaign URL Builder
But what Google allows us to do is to tag our URL’s so that when someone clicks on the link , it gives our analytics specific information about which of our campaigns caused them to click on the link to visit the website.
With our 20% off coupon code campaign, we can post our URL to Facebook with additional tags that tells our analytics it came from Facebook, on a timeline share, with a 20 percent discount, for the month of November.
When we look at our analytics at the end of the month we will know exactly how many people came from the specific 20% off link. Furthermore, if we have conversion tracking set up, we can find out how many of those clicks led to sales on our website.
To make this URL campaign tracking easy there are many UTM builders. The most popular of course comes from Google and this can be accessed at the following link:
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
On the screenshot below you can see how I entered the info from our example above:
For the website url you simply enter the URL of the page you want to link to.
The one thing that is required for you to enter is the campaign source. This one is pretty straightforward. If it is a Google Ad, you put Google as the source. If it is an email then you put Email as the source. If it is a Facebook post then you put Facebook as the source.
The next thing you can enter (optionally) is the campaign medium. If this link was a Facebook CPC ad then you would put CPC. If it was a Google Display Network ad you would put “display_ad.” Since this is a timeline post I was referring to, I put timeline as my medium. This is not required but it might help later on to remember where I originally placed my post.
The next thing you can do is give the campaign a name. It is important to use a campaign name so you know which campaign brought the visitor. You could be running multiple campaigns with different percentage discounts to see how much more effective a larger discount is on sales. In the example above I named this campaign 20percent.
Campaign Term was skipped because there was no bidding on a keyword.
If you want to differentiate this ad for different months you could enter November for Campaign Content. this would help compare months later on if needed.
Once you have all your information entered you can click on Copy URL and then paste that link into a Facebook timeline post. You can see all the ad tracking parameters in the URL below.
However that is pretty long so it is very common to shorten links with the URL shortener. The URL shortener may require you to create an account with Bit.ly.
In the example above, the URL was shortened to:
So instead of just linking to a 20% off coupon with this link:
You can link to the exact same page with https://goo.gl/6babQ5 and send Google analytics very specific information about your campaign.
Let’s practice this a few times using the website you created.
Do your best to answer the following questions. The answer is not always obvious and you will have to think a little critically for this assignment. If you struggle with this assignment go back to the Google modules or just use a Google search to help you find the answer.
1) What is your URL for your website?
2) If you had hosted an event that collected 50 email signatures and you wanted to email those 50 people about a 30% off promotion how would you tag the URL of your website to keep track of traffic from this campaign?
3) If you set up a Google Adwords CPC campaign that put ads on Google that direct people to visit your website once they click on the ads, how would you tag that URL to keep track of this campaign?
4) If you shared a Facebook post that talked about one of your blog posts and you linked back to that post (use www.YourURL.com/post_1) how would you tag that URL to keep track of this campaign? (hint: pick your own campaign term and keyword).
5) If you bought a banner ad on Yahoo that offered visitors a free shirt for visiting your website this month, how would you tag that URL to keep track of this campaign?
