Analytics for Marketers

Additional campaign tracking resources and tools

18th June, 2010 - Posted by gabe.francis - No Comments

Campaign tracking is fundamental to measuring the success of your online marketing efforts. Whether you use email newsletters, Facebook pages, twitter, link shares, or traditional online search ads you absolutely must be tagging your links properly. Doing so allows you much more control over the referring source data that you can later use to cross-segment and define success. Google Analytics has a particular method of link tagging you must follow. Let’s take a quick look at how they are constructed and how they work before providing links to useful tools.

How campaign tagging works

Analytics uses 5 extra parameters tags at the end of a url to import campaign information. They look something like this:

www.example.com?utm_campaign=campaign&utm_source=source&utm_medium=medium&utm_content=content&utm_term=keyword

Here’s what each parameter name means:

1. utm_campaign – The campaign name. Example, utm_campaign=myFBcampaign
2. utm_source – the campaign source. Example, utm_source=facebook
3. utm_medium – the type of campaign. Example, utm_medium=cpm
4. utm_content – the content of the campaign or ad. Example, utm_content=clicktowin
5. utm_term – the keyword or term used that triggered this link. Example, utm_term=social

Each of these tag values are imported into Google Analytics as segmentable campaign values. Try adding these parameters to your own website’s url. Open that tagged url and wait a few hours to see the values appear in your Traffic Sources > Campaign reports. Then try segmenting those values in Advanced Segments or in the Dimension drop down of other report tables.

Hint: If you already use different tag names for a similar purpose and would rather Analytics use those instead you can change these key names.

Useful tools to help you tag your links

• A life saver for those who hate tedium the URL Builder from Google helps make building a campaign tagged url from a landing page a snap.
• URL Builder from Stratigent is a free excel template with macros that help you create large sets of campaign tags all at once. Super useful if you don’t want to go one by one through the URL Builder linked above.
• Our own Caleb Whitemore has created a better Google Analytics URL Builder for creating more than one campaign link at a time.

Have any additional tips for campaign tracking? Are we missing other useful tagging tools? Please add them in the comments below.