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3B's Guide to Campaign Tracking |
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Written by Fraser Shipsides
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Tuesday, 19 May 2009 |
The following is the 3B Digital guide to help you make sense of Google Analytics campaign tracking. The following is a guide of our "best practices" to help you understand the campaign tracking and see how we use it for our clients. I think this guide will aid you create simple URLs that will help you track the flow of traffic to your site.
The idea of campaign tracking is that you see how effective your campaign has been. Google Analytics accurately tracks visitors from a source, such as a search engine or Email link, to a conversion or transaction on your site. It is used perfectly for site traffic driving initiatives such as banners, e-mails and newsletters.
The following are the data elements that can be tracked within the URL:
The original site URL: http://www.example.com
- Source: This identifies where the traffic came from - email, newsletter, twitter, banner, MSN, YAHOO
- Medium: To identify the medium of the campaign that it resides on - email, social-media, cost-per-click
- Content (optional): Used to differentiate links that point to the same URL - header of a newsletter or content of a newsletter.
- Term (optional): Uses a keyword filter so you can see how each link of the email campaign performed - [EMAIL], [LANGUAGE], {keyword}
- Campaign: Identifies the specific campaign/promotion - Product Launch, Glastonbury2009, Summer Sale
These are examples of valid URLs:
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http://www.example.com/example.html?utm_source=newsletter_001&utm_medium=email&utm_content=header&utm_term=[EMAIL]&utm_campaign=summersale
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http://www.example.com/example.html?utm_source=msn&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=leftbanner&utm_term={keyword}&utm_campaign=my-campaign
There are a few pointers that we at 3B recommend.
- Only use one question mark. One URL should only contain one question mark, if not the URL will/may break. (e.g. do not do the following http://www.example.com?id=123?utm_source=src&utm_medium=med&utm_campaign=cmp)
- It is good practice not to use capitals. Capitals can be used but it will mean that Google Analytics will think they are two different campaigns (when in fact they want to be tracked as the same campaign):
- http://www.example.com/example.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=header&utm_term=[EMAIL]&utm_campaign=summersale
- http://www.example.com/example.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=header&utm_term=[EMAIL]&utm_campaign=SUMMERSALE
Some more examples - Campaign specific:
A TWITTER CAMPAIGN
The original site URL: http://www.example.com
Source: twitter
Medium: social-media
Campaign field: tweet
URL: http://www.example.com?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social-media&utm_campaign=tweet
E-NEWSLETTER CAMPAIGN using PHPList
The original site URL: http://www.example.com
The source: newsletter
The Medium: email
The Content: Within the main text content (instead of header or footer etc)
The Term: Tracking language field within PHPList (English or German) (this could be any attribute - just use [ATTRIBUTE] instead - capitals, in square brackets - [EMAIL] is a good one if you don't need to track other attributes, and lets you know exactly who hit the site!)
Campaign field: product-launch
URL: http://www.example.com?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=main-content&utm_term=[LANGUAGE]&utm_campaign=product-launch
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