I was first introduced to Google Analytics URL tagging by a GA consultant. I was working at Environmental Working Group and they had an email list so large that the referral report was full of visits from variations of “mail.yahoo.com” – to the point where I couldn’t really see where true “referral” traffic was coming from. I was madly in love when introduced to GA’s URL tracking.
Google Analytics URL tracking allows for you to tag all sorts of URLs so that:
- The activity from those URLs are not tracked in your referral report, but in your “campaign” report section
- It allows you to segment marketing tactics and compare them against on another to see which tactic is truly the most successful for you in relation to driving traffic.
Setting up GA URL tracking
Google’s instructions on how to do URL tagging are pretty straightforward, however if you’re going to create quite a a few of these URLs, you should keep in mind that Google Analytics does not understand sentence case, and variations of “email”, “e-mail” and “Email” will create three different rows in your reporting and will make it hard to combine those efforts together. A spreadsheet like this one which was originally share with me by Epik One is much more useful in relation to keeping your tagging straight.
When you get started, there are few things to keep in mind:
- If you’re going to tag your emails campaigns, EVERY URL in those emails need this additional coding. One missed URL in an email and you will have dirty data in your Google Analytics reports.
- You can bit.ly these URLs after you have created them and they will still retain their tracking (or ow.ly- whichever shortener you’re using).
- Be careful to not add extra spaces or characters to the final URL, as this could break the URL and remove your tracking code.
- If you’re going to add additional mass email software tagging on top of these URLs, be careful as I’ve seen this remove the GA tracking all together.
There are a variety of other places you can use Google Analytics URL tagging. You can:
- Manually tag your Google AdWords PPC campaigns (but I would suggest you link your AdWords and Analytics accounts instead, as they dynamic tagging is going to give you more reliable metrics)
- Tag your display campaigns
- Track content that you’re sharing to social
- You can track the links in your link building emails (if you’re not using mass email software) to track how many people click on the links in your link building emails
- Track content that you’re sharing through social
- Track how much your online press releases are driving traffic
- etc etc
Tagging your links is a bit time consuming but the data you receive makes it really worth the effort.
So what are you waiting for? Start tagging your links today.