- As you expand your marketing efforts,
tracking will be essential in measuring
what is and isn't working.
Now, if you're using Google Analytics,
a core skill is to utilize campaign tagging,
which involves adding several parameters to your URLs.
But say you're running a summer sale
and you're going to publish a link to your landing page
on both Twitter and LinkedIn.
What you want to do is tag the URL with specific parameters
that lets you filter all the data
to evaluate how your campaign performed both in aggregate
and comparatively between Twitter and LinkedIn.
Now, most platforms have a function to track campaigns.
And in Google Analytics, this is done through custom URLs.
There are three key parameters that you'll add to your URLs.
utm_source, and you'll use this to identify
the advertiser, site, or publication
that is sending traffic to your property,
for example, Twitter or LinkedIn.
Then we have utm_medium.
And this is the advertising or marketing medium,
for example CPC or cost-per-click, social, and email.
And then we have utm_campaign.
And this is your individual campaign name
or promotional code.
You'll pair the parameter with a value
and then string them together with an ampersand,
starting the entire sequence with a question mark
at the end of your URL.
So for our Twitter post, we might have
mysite.com?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
&utm_campaign=summer-sale.
Now, we can take that same URL
and change the source to LinkedIn
and then share that URL directly to LinkedIn.
Now, it's common for social media platforms
to automatically shorten URLs.
But you can use a link shortener, such as Bitly.com.
Now, once you're using campaign tracking on your URLs,
you can view reports by campaign within Google Analytics.
Now, as you click on URLs on ads or email campaigns,
I want you to keep a close eye on the URL in your browser,
because you're going to see campaign tracking everywhere.
As you scale this effort,
you'll likely want to build a spreadsheet or document
that keeps track of what tags you used on what campaigns.
This way, you can better analyze the data
as you review the performance.
Now, I highly recommend using campaign tracking
as a way to bring even more granularity to your reporting.
And if you want to dig deeper, I encourage you to watch
Google Analytics Quick Start
and Google Analytics Essential Training.