How Google Analytics Can Track Your Email or PPC Campaign

If you have an email list, tracking your internet business's marketing campaigns is important. Many email list marketing solutions available will track when a person clicks on a link within your email and report it to you. But what if you are pointing your email to a landing page that also has traffic coming to it via other methods such as PPC or search traffic? This is where Google Analytics can help you track your PPC, email campaign and seperate the natural traffic from these campaigns.

How Google Analytics tracks your links

When a visitor to your site either from an internal or external link like PPC or an email comes to your webpage, Google Analytics can be setup to track each visitor based on specific criteria. This is done with a tracking code that is added on each link that can define a wide variety of information for you. Additionally, once installed the tracking code will track every view of the page and if you setup goals within Google Analytics you can continue to track these people as they move from your landing page.

Using campaign tracking

To start tracking your email, PPC, or other links as campaigns in Google Analytics all you need to do is add a bit of extra code at the end of your link. When a visitor arrives to your website a cookie is generated and Google Analytics takes the info and tracks it. Here are a few examples:

Original:
http://www.example.com

Modified:
http://www.example.com&utm_campaign=mycampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_source=free-shipping

Original:
http://www.example.com/test.html?id=10

Modified:
http://www.example.com/test.html?id=10&utm_campaign=mycampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_source=free-shipping

What does each utm_ tag do and mean?

utm_campaign

Utm_campaign is what you will use to identify the marketing campaign that you will be assigning to your link. With utm_campaign it's best to use either the campaign name itself or a descriptive word or two that will quickly identify the particular campaign. This way, when you are looking at all your tracked campaigns you will be able to quickly identify each seperate campaign with little difficulty.

utm_medium

The utm_medium is used to describe how your visitor got to your website's page. For utm_medium you want to be generic and think of it as a category. For an email campaign use "email". For a PPC campaign use "PPC". This way you'll have standard campaign categories that you can track.

utm_source

The utm_source is used to determine the "who" part of your campaign. This is where you would put who you are targeting with your marketing campaign. It can range from gender to geolocation or to people who are receiving a special promotion.

utm_content

The utm_content is used to seperate out your content per each campaign so you can track and do various A/B testing. For example if you are running some A/B testing you could use the utm_content as a way to track the different aspects of each. One could be utm_content=freeshipping and the other could be utm_source=10percdiscount. By doing this you now are able to track your seperate tests which will help you determine which choice gets a better ROI.

Now that you know what each utm_tag does and mean you may also want to know that you don't need to use all of them in a link to make your tracking successful. You may end up in situtations where it doesn't make sense to track a utm_content and therefore you don't need to include it in your tracking. What's important is that you track what you need to know or what you think you may want to know in the future.

utm_term

Utm_term is used for PPC campaigns as a way to define keywords that you use in your PPC campaigns.

Use the Google Analytics URL Builder

If creating a link with all the utm code seems daunting then you are in luck because you have several options to make this easier than manual typing it each time you need to use it. Google for instance provides a Google Analytics URL Builder that allows you to specify the tags, say what your original URL is and then have Google tell you what your modified URL will be. 

If creating one URL at a time is too slow or time consuming, my recommendation is for you to sit down and create an Excel spreadsheet that will mass do this for you with a few formulas. This way you can do as many as you want by simply copy the formula to many rows that have the original URL's added.

Shrinking your long and ugly URL

Once you get your new and modified link you may run into cases where you don't want it to be shown and instead you want a smaller and cleaner URL to be displayed instead. One option is to use a URL shortener like Bitly. Bitly will take your long link and make it much smaller and less ugly than what you originally had. Thus eliminating the long and ugly link issue.

Email marketing solutions

If you have decided to use an email marketing solution to send and track your email campaigns and want to also use Google Analytic's campaign tags these online email marketing companies are a few options. Some of them will do this automatically and the others require a bit of extra work at first to get it setup. Remember to also read through the TOS as not all of them will accept marketers that include affiliate links in their emails.