- When it comes to analytics, it's a case
of garbage in garbage out.
The way you track your campaigns makes a big difference
to your ability to analyze the performance
of your social media.
The most common way to track campaign performance
is by using parameters in the URL.
The most common ones are UTM Source
UTM Medium and UTM Campaign.
This is Google's Campaign Builder.
Shows you how to build a URL,
and you can use that URL directly in your social media
campaigns, so that when someone clicks
you can be able to attribute that in Google Analytics.
So if I add in here a website, example.com,
for Campaign Source,
this is where the traffic is coming from.
So if you were posting on Facebook,
you would put Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, or Reddit, Reddit.
You know, this needs to be the actual kind of platform
where you're posting on social.
Campaign Medium, typically you want to stick to
the general default rules that Google provides,
and you can find that here.
Typically, you want to say social
or social-network or social-media.
You could also do SM or social space network,
and any of these are going to match.
And then be bucketed as social by Google Analytics.
You can kind of see that in here.
If you look, this is your Source Medium Campaign Report.
And if you go into source media, music, Google, organic,
or Tico referral.
Now, if you go to channels, you should be able to
see the Tico referral has been bucketed into social.
So if I click into social, then you can see Twitter.
And then if I bring in my Source Medium
then here we go, Tico referral.
So this is what Twitter automatically adds.
And if I want to distinguish Twitter traffic that came
from my posts, from what Twitter organically kind of gave me
from other people sharing.
Then this is where I'd need to do it.
And it's really important because if you get this wrong,
if you put a misspelling or you make a mistake,
or you use the wrong naming convention, then
it's going to show up that way in your analytics forever.
So you'll always have to remember, I have to look
for this one specific campaign that I messed up on.
So if we go back to the campaign builder,
if we add a social-media, and then for the campaign,
we can call this really whatever we like.
Here they use the example of the spring sale
but I like to use usually, you know,
the date that I publish, so 2021,
02-23, that's today's date.
And then you can use the campaign name.
So whatever it is you're trying to post.
So in this case, you could say, you know,
this is my weekly date.
And you see here, I'm using hyphens to separate the words.
The reason that's important is it has to
be something that's valid in a URL.
So if we go to this URL, decoder, encoder,
you can see if I just put spaces.
So if I typed in news space campaign space name
that would actually break the URL.
So you would need to encode it.
Now you can see, you can click, encode,
and it's replaced this with %20.
You know, you can decode that.
And then, you know,
Google Analytics would know that you meant a space there.
But if you put a dash, then it shouldn't need encoding.
So there we go.
There's no encoding.
Cool.
So you have to make sure you don't break the URL.
You can also add in campaign term,
which could be the key words,
or audience that you're targeting, or campaign content,
which could be the ad format.
Use that to differentiate the different types of posts
that you're doing.
But either way, Google will generate this URL for you.
And you can see that they've made it here.
You could copy the URL or they do have a link shortener
that you could use as well.
So that's the way that you can do it
with the Google Campaign Builder.
But typically what most people do is they
build their own templates.
So if you take a look, there's a blog post I wrote
a while ago, I showed you how to build your own template.
And I go into a bit more detail about why this is important.
So feel free to check this out.
I'll also provide a link to the template here.
You can see what this is doing is you're putting your URL.
You're also putting the source,
and you're able to choose from individual sources.
So you'd never get the name wrong.
And if, actually, if you try and put the wrong name in
it's going to tell you invalid.
And then it's concatenating these different values together.
So you see at the end you have your full URL.
So now you understand how to attract campaign performance
on social media, you can be able to do a pretty good job
of calculating the ROI of social media.
You'll be able to distinguish, you know,
what came from what you posted, versus, you know,
what came from just organic social sharing activity
from your customers.
And doing a good job with your out-prompts
is really key to be able to analyze your performance.
Like I said, it's garbage in garbage out.
Without it, you're going to be in the dark
about what's working or not.