Understanding where your site visitors are coming from can inform your marketing spend, tactical choices and help you take advantage of opportunities arising from insight into your user behaviour.

In order to effectively track where your users are coming from, however, it’s important to understand the tools at your disposal. In this post we are going to look at how you can set up campaign tracking.

Web Analytics is not only useful when tracking visits to your site, but can also tell you where your visitors are coming from. These can be from Search (organic and paid), direct (typing the URL directly into the browser or bookmarking the site) or from Google AdWords (using auto tagging). Some campaigns, like banner ads and emails, which don’t make use of Google AdWords need to be manually tagged, this can be done using campaign tracking.

When a visitor visits your site from an untagged campaign, Google Analytics doesn’t know how they got there and may group them into an incorrect source (meaning you are not gathering useful information here). Campaign tracking or campaign tagging appends multiple parameters (source, medium, term, content and campaign) onto the end of the URL. This enables Google Analytics to sort and organise these parameters into an easy-to-compare format. This allows you to not only compare metrics and data across multiple channels but also helps you understand how visitors are getting to your site and whether these visitors are converting. For example, if Quirk sent out your monthly email newsletter and the content was based on analytics, the URL would end up looking something like this: 

Quirk website: www.quirk.biz
New URL with parameters appended:
www.quirk.biz?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=promo&utm_content=analytics&utm_campaign=feb2012

This URL is then used as the link to your site – it does not change the destination but helps Google Analytics to accurately identify the source of the traffic to the site. This therefore helps marketers to make informed decisions about their campaigns.

Campaign tracking made easy

This tool is available for free using Google URL builder. At Quirk we use a spreadsheet which allows us to build multiple URL’s and combines all the parameter information into a fully tagged URL which is easy for Google Analytics to read. We have shared this spreadsheet as a shared Google Doc  which you can download and use as a template for your campaigns.

Some challenges faced

You may have noticed the ? before the tracking parameters. This signifies the start of campaign tracking for Google Analytics. Sometimes, parameters passed into features on your site (like a booking engine) can break the URL if the ? is used. In this case it is necessary to customise the tagged URL by substituting the ? with a #. Remember that if you’re using the # you need to customise your Google Analytics tracking code by adding in this snippet of code:

_setAllowAnchor(true)

Google Analytics will now identify the # as the start of the tracking.

URL tagging should only be used for external campaigns and not on internal campaigns (links on your site which link to another page of your site).

To understand why, let’s use an example: imagine a visitor clicks on a link in your email newsletter and arrives at your site, browses around and does not convert. They then click on an internal campaign (a banner ad) which links to another page within your site, and then convert.

This conversion will be attributed to the internal campaign in Google Analytics. The two different “clicks” (the link in the newsletter and the banner ad) are seen as the start of two different visits – this can create confusion and make it difficult to understand the complete user journey.

Another factor to remember when tagging your URL’s is that consistency is key!

Maintaining consistency in your naming convention across mediums will bucket the data in a more sensible fashion. For example, Google Analytics views upper case and lower case versions of the same word as being different campaigns (February and february). Ensuring that there is consistent format for naming will allow you to compare campaigns run over different mediums more easily. Consistency is also important because you may be the one creating the campaign tracking but there are often different business units reading the reports.

Remember, having consistent naming conventions will make it easier for them to identify campaigns.

Many companies and brands often overlook campaign tracking, however if used correctly and consistently, this simple yet underestimated tool will provide powerful insights into your campaigns effectiveness.

Has campaign tracking worked for your business an what are some of the challenges you have faced?