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- [Corey] Measuring how and where traffic is coming from
to our site is one of the most important things
we can measure in analytics.
So coming down, we can see that Google is the highest source
and the medium is organic search.
And we also have direct visits.
That's where someone just types the URL
right into the browser,
so the source is direct and there is no medium.
We also have a link
that someone clicked in an email signature
and the medium is email.
And we have a Twitter post on social media.
We also have a referral from the website LinkedIn,
and that's just a fancy way of saying
that someone was referred by following a link,
so those are hyperlink clicks.
So some of this information,
like the referrals and organic search and of course direct,
is automatically captured by the browser
and passed along.
Google Analytics grabs that info
and uses it wherever it can.
But sometimes we need to take that a step further
and make it really powerful.
If we're able to supply some extra info about the click,
perhaps that this click is part of a paid campaign
or an email or social media post,
well how does Google know that?
Well, we have a way of doing that
and we can tell Google Analytics to track that extra info.
We call this manual tagging.
Let's look at an example here.
Let's say that you have a marketing campaign
happening with just one source.
So in this case, our source is Twitter.
How do we differentiate the traffic coming in
from a tweet on sale items
versus another tweet on a buy one get one free for t-shirts?
Well, since the source is Twitter,
of course the medium is social,
there's no way to separate these two lines of traffic
with just these two pieces of information.
And what we don't want to do
is start stuffing extra info into these.
And you're going to cause more problems when you want to look at
all of your social traffic grouped together.
What we're going to do is use another field entirely.
This is where campaign tracking comes in.
In the campaign reports, this is one of the most useful
and important concepts in Google Analytics.
When you add these campaigns to the mix,
you can track different marketing initiatives
by source, medium, and a campaign name.
So let's think back to this Twitter example.
By tagging the two Twitter posts here
as different campaigns,
we can easily differentiate between the two traffic routes
both coming in from that source.
Because we've tagged the top one as a flash sale
and we've tagged the bottom one
as a buy one get one free t-shirt,
actually let's look at exactly how we would do that.
We're going to track these campaigns
using what we call UTM parameters.
They're going to be a regular URL,
and we're just going to stuff some extra information,
these UTM parameters into that URL,
and Google has a special tool to help us do this
and make sure the formatting gets right.
And you could copy this in and type this in
or we can just head on over here to Google
and type in Google Analytics URL builder.
It'll take us right there.
Okay, so the first thing I want to do here
is put in our website.
I actually have to type in the HTTPS.
And the next thing we want to do is put in our source.
So we set our source as Twitter.
Our medium is social
and our campaign name was buy one get one free.
Now we can also put in content.
So this is often used to differentiate the creative view,
so maybe this one we used a blue t-shirt.
So we come down here and it's generated this URL for us.
So go ahead and copy that URL.
And when someone clicks on this link,
it will open up the site
and you'll see it's just going to be the regular page here.
So the page we put in,
in this case, it was just the homepage,
and these extra URL parameters here.
They don't do anything to change the site itself,
but they're telling the underlying analytics
how to track these.
The source should be Twitter.
The medium should be social
and the campaign should be buy one get one free
and the content is the blue t-shirt.
So that's all going to be sent back to Google
as part of this traffic source recording.
So if we do this for all of the links that we generate
and we put out in our tweets and our social media posts
or emails that we send,
we will categorize how this is seen into Google Analytics,
and we'll get much better data,
which result in much better analysis.
I can't stress the importance enough of campaign tagging.
By tagging these campaigns consistently here,
we make it very easy to come back, analyze this,
and understand which of these things are being clicked on,
which ones are working, which ones are converting,
and which ones aren't.
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