Tagging marketing campaigns to get better Analytics data

The theme of being able to successfully track data through Google Analytics continues in our second newsletter article this month. Here we discuss the importance of gathering clean and correct data before analysing it. “Tagging” online marketing campaigns is one way in which this can be achieved.

This tagging involves adding an extension to any link included in online marketing activity that points to your site – such as email newsletters, online ads or from social media sites – so that the particular traffic source of the visit can be identified.

The three compulsory types of parameters to define are the channel of a campaign (e.g. email, affiliate, display); the source within a channel (e.g. name/type of the email campaign); and the campaign within one or more sources / channels (e.g. October newsletter). This can be tricky if multiple people are involved in a campaign, although if this is the case, it has to be done in a uniform manner by using a clearly defined tagging plan to which each participant must adhere.

An example of this extension would be:

http://www.yourdomain.com.au?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_october

If a link to the site within the newsletter that contains this extension tag were then clicked upon, it would be possible in Analytics to see that a visit came from this newsletter/email traffic source. For each newsletter that is sent the month is changed in the tag, so you can identify which newsletter generated the visit and the results of different newsletters can be compared.

Another example is for Social Media, for which the following tag may be used:

http://www.yourdomain.com.au?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tweet_offer_australia

Within Google Analytics, the collected data can be found under All Traffic Sources as “twitter / social”. You can track the tweets you send out by adding a tag like the one above to your URL’s on Twitter. It is also possible to use this technique for other social media sites, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, and it’s an effective way to determine visits from traffic sources that wouldn’t normally be as specifically defined by Analytics, thus improving the quality of the data.

An easy way create the URL extensions, or tags, is to use the Google URL Builder.

Please note that if your Google Analytics account has been linked to an active AdWords account, there’s no need to tag your AdWords links – auto-tagging will do it for you automatically. However, for some sites this auto-tagging doesn’t work and therefore manual URL extensions may need to be used.

If you’d like more information about the benefits of tagging campaigns within Analytics and how this can improve your business’s online marketing, please contact us now.

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