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. newsletter October). This can be tricky if multiple people are involved in a campaign. 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:
?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:
?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tweetofferaustralia
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 for other social media such as Facebook and is 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.
This article was first published in the November 2011 edition of our monthly newsletter.
To find out more about Google Analytics and how you can use it effectively for your business, please get in touch for an initial, no obligation, discussion. Alternatively, if you are thinking of using website analytics for the first time, or have already started tracking your visitor data, we can provide you with a FREE analytics assessment to give you an idea of the key elements you should be tracking and reviewing to increase the performance of your website.
