Tagging Advertising Campaign Links

There’s more to the picture than meets the eye here. You can track email, PDF downloads, links, banners or even offline advertising. To tag links your URL is tagged with a query string that tells Google Analytics additional information. You can use the Google URL builder for free to build your.

Tracking with Tags has 6 Basic Elements

  • Destination URL- The page your visitor ends up on.
  • Campaign (utm_campaign)- The complete marketing campaign E.g. wholesale campaign.
  • Medium (utm_medium)- How did the person find your website? E.g. Referral, Email, Search Engine or Paid Traffic.
  • Source (utm_source)- Name of the campaign. E.g. Christmas-08-banner.
  • Content (utm_content)- Used to identify differences between ads, email newsletters or banners.
  • Term (utm_term)- The main phrase or keyword you are promoting (Anchor text)

Find the ad, text link or banner you want to tag and open it in an html editor. The code will look something like this.
Link Browser Displays

Learn Google Analytics

Source Code

<a href=”http://galearning.com/google-analysis/google-analytics-video-training/”>Learn Google Analytics</a>

Change the original source code to the tagged version using the manual tag builder or hand coding, whichever you are more comfortable with.

Original Code

<a href=”http://www.galearning.com/join.php”>Learn Google Analytics</a>

Modified Code

Code was generated using the manual tool builder.
In this example I am using Facebook but the coding logic can be used to manually tag any important traffic source where you control the coding. E.g. Email campaigns, other advertising engines like Yahoo! or Bling and banner campaigns.

  • Publish your modified code- It’s really that simple! Once you upload the the modified code Google Analytics will show you data on that source. How well do they convert? How long do they stay on your site. Where and why do they leave? These are 3 simple questions that are answered in Google Analytics.

When the destination urls are appropriately tagged they will show up in your reports completely defined.

On this website we have goal funnels set up that log purchases. In this case we can multiply 3322 visits X .81% (conversion rate) = 27 purchases. How much did we spend on our marketing efforts? How many sales were made? What is the value of a lifetime business relationship?

Bottom line…

What is your ROI?

Finally, you can create a Facebook Advertising filter in Google Analytics that filters only CPC traffic. By doing this you will be able to see your Facebook paid traffic alone. If any natural traffic comes from Facebook it will show up segmented.

The highlighted line is traffic from your paid advertising with Facebook and the second line is natural traffic that came to your site through links that were not tagged (non-paid)

How to Create a Facebook Profile

Go to your profile settings and create a filter.

Filter Name: Facebook Only Traffic

Filter Type: Custom>Include

Filter Field: Campaign Source

Filter Pattern: facebook

Case Sensitive: No

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