So, what is campaign tagging in Google Analytics? And how do we do it? And why
would we want to? Hi, I'm Rachel Clemens, Digital Strategist Whaler here at Whole
Whale. On today's episode of Whole Whale TV, we're going to walk through custom
campaign tagging in Google Analytics.
Before we start, let's cover the basics. What is custom campaign tagging? Custom
tagging is how you add parameters to a URL to better capture reporting data
about your referring ad campaigns. Custom campaign tagging is useful because it
lets us see how much traffic comes from individual ad campaigns, which also helps
us assess the return on investment of each of our marketing efforts. While
Google Analytics tracks traffic sources by default, custom campaign tagging lets
you get even more granular. Once tagged, you can compare the results of a
campaign across, say, email versus social media, which can inform future marketing
decisions. What should I tag, you may ask?
Examples of campaigns that you should tag include email campaigns -- without
custom tags, emails don't always register correctly as a source in analytics. You
should also tag paid social campaigns, and any digital print pieces like press
releases that may be driving traffic to your site. You don't need to tag regular
social media posts, because GA already tracks these for you. Just tagging the
paid efforts will be enough to see the differences between the two. Same goes
for Google Ad campaigns. As long as your AdWords account is auto-linked to your
Google Analytics account, these are automatically tracked for you. Make sense?
Great. Now let's get tagging. Setting up campaign tagging is easy when you use
Google's Campaign URL Builder. Once you provide the main elements of your
campaign, this tool creates a custom tagged URL for you. You don't have to do
anything in Google Analytics to set this up. If you're using the tagged URL, then
GA will collect the corresponding data. Let's walk through it. Say that Whole
Whale is running a paid Facebook ad campaign to send traffic to our tips
page. The first thing we need to identify in building a tagged URL is our website
URL, the place that we're trying to send traffic to in this campaign. In this case,
that's the tips page. Aside from the URL, there are three important pieces of info
that we need. The first is the campaign source. This is the platform on which
we're running the campaign -- the source that's sending traffic to our target URL.
In this scenario, the source would be Facebook. Next, we need to add the
campaign medium, which is your marketing medium. For our purposes today, since
we're running paid ads on Facebook, the medium would be CPC for cost-per-click.
The last thing we need is the campaign name. Naming our campaigns in a
recognizable way is important. Since we're trying to send traffic to our tips
page here, we could name our campaign "tips" to keep it simple. Keeping your name
and conventions consistent is important. If you name your campaign "Tips" with a
capital T, and someone else in your team uses a lowercase t in building the
URL, then these will show up in Google Analytics as two separate campaigns. The
optional content and term fields allow you to note even more specific
differences in the content of your campaign. For instance, you might
hyperlink your tagged URL in text while also linking it from an image. Using the
content field would allow you to note this and spot differences in GA if you
were interested in seeing how those links did. The term field usually applies
to paid search campaigns, but could also be used for another level of specificity.
Once you've filled in all the fields you need to, your URL should be ready to go.
You can copy and paste your tagged URL directly from the URL Builder. Note
that tagged URLs can get really lengthy. Keep your user experience in mind and
use a tool like bit.ly to make a vanity URL when your tagged version looks too
long. That's all there is to it! Go forth and custom tag campaigns at
will. If you have questions you can leave them in the comments below, or tweet us
@wholewhale. And don't forget to join me for our next video to learn more about how
to find and analyze the data from your newly tracked campaigns. If you want to
dive deeper with Whole Whale, visit wholewhale.com/university and use the
promo code WWVIDEO to get 80% off on all of our
Whole Whale U courses. Thanks for watching.