Track Campaigns Better: Google Analytics URL Tagging

Posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 7:16 am.

I am frequently surprised by the amount of people using Google Analytics who aren’t familiar with URL tagging. This is the process of adding extra information to a link, so that Analytics can identify it as coming from a particular source, keyword and/or advert.

In fact, URL tagging happens automatically for all AdWords users – it’s how Analytics knows the difference between “paid” and “organic” traffic in your Search Engines and Keywords reports. But its use reaches far beyond AdWords. Consider an email newsletter or “e-shot”. If you make a plain, normal link in your email, the traffic it generates will be split between the Direct Traffic report and the Referral Traffic report.

Why? Because if you use an email client like Outlook, clicking a link in an email is like copying and pasting that link directly into the web browser’s address bar. If you use webmail like GMail, Hotmail or similar though, you are already visiting a website (the webmail site) and clicking a link is a referral from that site. So visitors from an email campaign will be split between the two. Worse, they will be lumped in with the Direct or Referred traffic you got that day anyway. Hardly the ideal method of measuring the success of your email marketing.

If those links in the email had been tagged, you could identify every single visitor generated by that email as a distinct group. You could then measure their engagement (time on site, pages per visit etc.) and their conversion rate, as well as making them an Advanced Segment to delve deeper into their visits and compare them to other groups of visitors, or even the last email marketing you did (if that was tagged too).

How does it work then? Pretty simple, as it happens. You simply need to add some information in Google’s defined format on to the end of the link addresses in your email. It looks like this:

http://www.website.com/page.htm?utm_campaign=campaign-name&utm_medium=marketing-medium&utm_source=website-or-email&utm_content=advert-content

Looks exciting eh? If you break it down, you have a list like this one on Google’s help page:

	Banner Ad	E-mail Campaign	Pay Per Click Keywords
Campaign Source	citysearch	newsletter1	overture
Campaign Medium	banner	email	cpc
Campaign Term	Boston	July	the keyword you purchased
Campaign Content
Campaign Name	productxyz	productxyz	productxyz

So:

• Source is the place that the visitor comes from
• Medium is the type of marketing (cpc stands for Cost Per Click and is the standard term for defining pay-per-click advertising in Analytics)
• Term is the keyword used (or any other defining feature of the advert)
• Content is only really required for distinguishing between pay-per-click advert content for the same keyword
• Name is the name of your campaign, whether it is a specific campaign or maybe something like “Newsletters”

In the example of an email newsletter, I might define the Name as “Newsletters” and the Source as “December Newsletter”, thereby grouping all my newsletters in one campaign, but being able to distinguish between each month’s newsletter within that campaign.

You could also use the Content tag to define which link in an email someone clicks. For instance, you might link to the same page three times: once at the top of the email, then in the body copy and finally at the bottom in case people missed the point. If you don’t differentiate between those links, you won’t know which one got clicked on most, because they all go to the same page. So, my URL tag for the first link might look like this:

?utm_campaign=Newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_source=December&utm_content=Top

My URL tag for the body copy link would be the same, but it would say “utm_content=Body” at the end instead, and so on. If you don’t want to mess around writing your own link tags in HTML, Google provides a URL Builder here.

The uses for URL tagging don’t end there, as you can tell from the table. If you do any pay-per-click (CPC) advertising anywhere but AdWords, you won’t be getting the URL tagging automatically, so traffic from the likes of Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN AdCenter will be appearing as either Direct or Organic traffic, meaning you have no information on the performance of those paid-for adverts once the visitor lands on your site.

What about advertising on a site that also links to you organically? Again, all traffic will be referred, but you won’t know how much of it comes from the paid-for advertising. If you tagged your advert links, you would see those visitors as a distinct group. The same is true if you use Google Merchant Centre (formerly Base) to list your products in Google Shopping search results – if you don’t tag your Base feed URLs, all the traffic will be lumped in with normal Google organic traffic and you won’t see how your Shopping listings are performing. The screenshot below shows how Shopping traffic has been separated by tagging the visitors as coming from “base”, with Yahoo pay-per-click traffic also distinguished from organic Yahoo visitors:

By using URL tagging, we can then see the visitor engagement statistics for those groups, along with their conversion rate, per-visit value etc. It gives us much better information to use when deciding what works and what doesn’t in our online marketing campaigns.

If you want to learn more about using Analytics, I have Google Analytics training events scheduled for next year in London and Nottingham. You can see all my planned training events here.