Hey there, Benjamin from Loves Data here. Welcome back! In this video, I'm going to show you how to
track your inbound marketing campaigns into GA4 (Google Analytics 4) using campaign tagged URLs.
You can use this technique to report on the performance of any custom campaigns you're
using to send people to your website. Including paid ads on social, email campaigns, and more.
We're going to cover how to add campaign tags (also called UTM parameters) to URLs using
Google's URL builder. This lets you track your inbound marketing, but before we do,
I want to show you the acquisition reports in GA4. This is useful because you will see where your
campaigns will show up in the reports. So let's head to Google Analytics... I've already logged
into Google's demo account, so let's navigate to 'Reports'... And then select 'Acquisition'...
When you open you're Google Analytics property you will see three reports here. There is the
'Acquisition Overview', which provides a top-level summary about how people are finding your website.
There is the 'User Acquisition' report which shows you how people first find your website.
And the 'Traffic Acquisition' report which shows you how people found your website
to start a session. Since people can access your website multiple times using different methods,
my preference is to use the 'Traffic Acquisition' report, so let's open this report...
If we look at the table, we can see that this shows us 'Session Default Channel Grouping'...
This automatically combines different methods people use to find your website
into top-level categories or groups. For example, we can 'Organic Search' which will primarily be
people finding the website on Google, but will also include other search engines, like Bing.
The 'Paid Search' channel will include traffic from Google Ads... And traveling down, 'Organic
Social' will include our free traffic from social networks... So 'Default Channel Grouping'
provides a top-level summary for the different methods people use to find your website. Let's
change this. Let's select 'Session Default Channel Grouping... And change this to 'Session Source'...
Source shows us where people found our website. It tells us where our message was seen. We can
see we have some direct traffic, traffic from 'google', and traffic from other sites...
For example, our 'google' traffic tells us that people found our website on Google. Okay,
now let's change the dimension again. Let's change it to 'Session Medium'...
Medium tells us how our message was communicated. We can see we have traffic from 'organic', 'cpc',
'referral' and so on... For example, organic will include all of the free traffic to our website,
while 'cpc' which stands for 'cost per click' will be from our paid ads. We can also see referral,
which is reported when someone clicks through from another website to our website. For example,
if someone links to our website in a blog post. Traffic from this link
will be reported as a referral. And let's change the dimension to 'Session Campaign'...
This will include your Google Ads campaigns (if you're running ads and you have your
account linked to Google Analytics). We can see these as we travel down the table...
And once you're using campaign tagged URLs, you will also see the names of your custom campaigns
in this report. I want to highlight that the first four rows are for non-campaign traffic...
And I want to show you two more things before we start adding
campaign tags to our URLs. Let's change the dimension back to 'Session Source'...
And now let's click the plus sign to add a second dimension to the report...
And let's choose 'Session Acquisition' and then 'Session Medium'...
This means we can see where the message was seen on the left and how the message
was communicated on the right... We can now see our Google organic and our Google cpc traffic
separately in the report. If you've been using the previous version of Google Analytics,
then this is like the 'All Traffic' report in Universal Analytics.
When you create your campaign tags, you will get to define your own source, medium and campaign
name to show in these reports. And the key benefit of tracking your custom campaigns,
is that you get to see how people engage once they're on your website. Scrolling to the right,
we can see metrics like 'Engaged Sessions', 'Average Engagement Time', along with
'Conversions' and 'Revenue'... So you will be able to report on the results from your campaigns.
Now that we've looked at the default reports, it's time to start tracking our campaigns.
To make this easier, Google has a tool called the 'Campaign URL Builder'. I've included a
link in the description below this video. And just to highlight, you can access this tool
without logging into your account. Okay, let's take a look... Let's select 'GA4' on top of the
tool... To start we need to enter the landing page we want to send people to on our website...
I'm going skip 'Campaign ID' for now... And we can then enter the 'Campaign Source' (or where
the message is seen)... And then the 'Campaign Medium' (or how the message is communicated)....
Next is 'Campaign Name', which is optional, but I generally recommend naming your campaign so
that you can see this in your report. The campaign name lets you define the overarching initiative.
There are also two additional campaign tags we can define – these are 'Campaign Term' and
'Campaign Content'. 'Campaign Term' is designed for tracking third party paid search campaigns.
For example, if you're running search ads on Bing. You can use this to report on the keywords that
are sending traffic to your website. And 'Campaign Content' lets you report on different ads
or calls-to-action you're using in yoru campaigns. Whatever we define for these
tags will be reported into Google Analytics when someone clicks through to our website. Ideally,
we want to apply campaign tags to all of the inbound links sending traffic to our website.
The more inbound links we tag, the easier it is to see how our campaigns are performing.
In my example, we can see I'm going to be tracking an ad on LinkedIn that sends people to my website.
I've entered 'linkedin.com' as the source and 'paid' as the medium. Below the campaign tags
we've entered we can see a long URL that includes the landing page we defined at the start,
along with the campaign tags. We then copy and paste this URL – for our example, this would be
the URL we use in our ad on LinkedIn. When people click on the link in the ad, they're directed
to our landing page and Google Analytics will report on the values for 'source', 'medium' and
'campaign'. Let's look at another example... When it comes to campaign tagging email newsletters we
have a number of options. A popular option is to use the 'source' to track editions of our
emails. We can see in this example we have 'August 2022' as the source and the medium is 'email'. I
always recommend keeping the 'medium' as simple as possible, so 'email' is perfect for this campaign.
Next we have the overarching campaign name of 'email news', which you'll want to customize
for your own campaign. We're leaving term blank because term should only be used when someone
is searching, for example in third party cost per click campaigns. And in this example we're using
the optional 'content' to distinguish different links within the same email newsletter. So this
is one option using campaign tagged URLs to track the editions of our email newsletter
and we'd change the 'source' for each edition we send. And let's look at one more example...
If you're running ads on social that sends traffic through to your website, you should campaign
tag those links so that you can distinguish paid versus organic social traffic within your reports.
Start off by naming the source as the particular social network. This should be the domain name of
the social network. Then I recommend setting 'paid' as the medium. This will allow you to
differentiate from your organic social traffic which will show up as referrals. You can then
name the campaign. You'll want to customize these to describe your particular campaigns.
You can then use the optional 'content' parameter to distinguish the particular ad variation
or the call to action. I also want to mention the 'Campaign ID' parameter that I skipped earlier.
This parameter lets you define your own identifier for your campaign.
It is optional, but if you want to import advertising cost data into Google Analytics,
then you will need to define this for your campaign tagged URLs. If you would like to
learn more about data import, then I've included a link in the extra resources below this video.
Once you're using campaign tagged URLs, you will be able to see them in the acquisition reports we
covered previously. Plus, you will also be able to see them in the attribution reports and when you
create custom exploration reports in GA4. Let's head back to Google Analytics to take a look...
You can view the dedicated attribution reports in GA4 by selecting 'Advertising'...
These reports consider the different marketing touch points people engage with
before converting on your website. Let's open the 'Conversion Paths' report...
We can see this report, like the acquisition report we looked at previously
shows us the 'Default Channel Grouping'... But we can change this...
We can see we can also choose source, medium, and campaign. So whatever you have defined as
the source, medium, and campaign name for your tagged URLs can appear in this report too.
Let's select 'Campaign'... In Google's demo account, we can see Google Ads campaigns
included in the table. But remember in your reports, you will see Google Ads campaigns,
along with any campaign tagged links that are sending traffic to your website.
To learn more about attribution in GA4 and these attribution reports,
check out my dedicated tutorial. I've included a link in the description below this video.
Now let's create a custom exploration report for our campaign tagged links. Let's navigate to
'Explore'... And let's create a blank report... Let's name the report 'Custom Campaigns'...
And let's click the plus sign next to 'Dimensions'... And let's search for 'Campaign'...
We can see there are a range of dimensions. If you're getting started, then I recommend
using the session-based dimensions at the bottom.
The dimensions listed under 'Attribution' require that you have conversions configured in GA4. If
you don't, then the report won't show you any results. So let's select 'Session Campaign'...
Now let's search for 'Source'... Again, we can see a range of dimensions. I'm going to enable
'Session Source' and 'Session Medium' towards the bottom... Now let's click 'Import'...
And let's click the plus sign to the right of 'Metrics'...
I'm going search for and enable 'Sessions'...
And 'Conversions'... And 'Engagement Rate'...
Feel free to enable any other metrics you want included in your report. Then when you're happy,
click 'Import'... And to create our report, we need to drag the dimensions under 'Rows'...
And the metrics under 'Values'... We can see our report on the right... Since the first few rows
aren't from our campaigns, let's add a filter to the report. To do this, let's select 'Filters'
in the second column... And choose 'Session Campaign'... Then select 'Does Not Match Regex'...
And enter 'carat', 'backslash', 'open parenthesis', 'full-stop', 'asterisk',
'backslash', 'close parenthesis', 'dollar sign'... This will remove any values for the campaign
dimension that start and end with a parenthesis. Now let's click 'Apply'... Our report updates
and we're now focused on our custom campaigns, including any Google Ads campaigns we're running.
So that's how you can track campaigns in Google Analytics using campaign tagged URLs.
Remember, whatever you choose to define as the source, medium, campaign, and other tags
will show up in your reports. It's always a good idea to use simple, easy to understand
tags for your campaigns. Are you tracking and reporting on your campaigns in GA4?
I'd love to know! Let me know in the comments below! And if you found this video helpful,
please like it, so I know to make more videos like this one. I'll see you in the next video!