In this lesson we'll explore how Google Analytics collects and reports information about your
traffic sources.
We'll also cover how you can track your marketing campaigns.
Let's think back to creating a measurement plan.
One step was to identify the key segments for your business.
A common set of segments that almost every business needs to measure is marketing campaigns
--
the traffic-driving initiatives that bring customers to your site.
Being able to identify these campaigns and traffic sources in reports
allows you tie your marketing investment to conversions and revenue.
For each user that comes to your site,
Google Analytics automatically captures a number of attributes, or dimensions,
about where the user came from.
Two such dimensions are "source" and "medium."
The "source" is the name of the website that referred the user to your site.
For example, if a user clicks over to your site from Google search, the source will be
"google."
The "medium" is the mechanism, or "how" the user got to your site.
For example, if a user clicks over to your site from an unpaid search result,
the medium will be "organic."
Google Analytics detects three mediums without any customization.
The first default medium is "Organic."
It represents traffic that comes from organic, or unpaid, search results.
Another default medium is "referral."
Any traffic that comes to your site from another website that's not a search engine
will show up in your reports as a "referral."
The final default medium is "(none)."
This medium is applied only for users that come directly to your site by either typing
your URL into a browser or clicking on a bookmark.
In your reports, you will see these users have a source of "direct" and a medium of
"(none)."
But what about your other channels?
Like social media campaigns, email campaigns, banner ads and other programs?
How do these show up in Google Analytics?
To track campaigns in Google Analytics, you use a process called link tagging.
Link tagging is adding extra information to the links
that users click on to get to your site.
This extra information that you provide is stored in campaign tags,
and overwrites the default categorization that would normally be assigned to the incoming
traffic.
For example, let's say that you send a monthly newsletter to your customers.
The newsletter has links that go to your website.
Adding campaign tags to these links allows Google Analytics
to identify that the user came from an email campaign.
There are five campaign tags that you can use.
You'll usually use at least three when tagging links.
The "Source" and "Medium" tags allow you to overwrite the source and medium
that would ordinarily get set by default.
For the newsletter, you might set the source to "julynews" and the medium to "email".
Another campaign tag is called "Campaign."
Use this to name your marketing campaign.
For the newsletter, you might set this to "summersale".
You should always use the Campaign, Medium and Source tags when tracking a campaign.
The last two campaign tags are optional -- "Term" and "Content."
Term identifies the keyword for paid search campaigns.
The Content tag can be used to differentiate versions of an ad.
For example, if you have two different versions of an email newsletter,
you can use the Content tag to differentiate visits from "newsletter1" and "newslette2".
So why is link tagging so important?
Let's say we have two versions of a display ad.
And let's assume that both ads are running on the exact same site.
The first ad does not have any campaign tags but the second ad does.
When users click on the first ad,
they will be identified as referrals coming from the website hosting the display ad.
Google Analytics will not collect any campaign information because there were no tags.
When users click on the second ad,
they will be identified as coming from a named campaign,
because the ad contained the campaign tags.
So you can see, if you don't tag your campaigns properly
it can lead to incorrect data in your reports.
You can use a tool called the URL builder to learn how to construct your campaign tags
correctly.
The tool can be found in the Google Analytics help center.
To use the URL builder, first enter the destination URL for your ad,
which is just the URL where you want a person to land.
Then enter the values you want for each campaign tag.
Use consistent spelling and capitalization when entering tag values.
Since Google Analytics is case sensitive, a campaign named "PROMO1" in all uppercase
will show up separately from a campaign named "promo1" in all lowercase.
Also, standardize on consistent values for your specific mediums,
like "cpc" for cost-per-click,
"social" for social media activities
and "display" for your display ads.
The URL builder can only construct one URL at a time,
so you probably won't want to use it to construct every URL for every campaign.
If you have a large number of URLs to tag,
you can use a spreadsheet to simplify the process.
Spreadsheets with an embedded formula can make it much easier to generate thousands
of tagged URLs quickly.
Now let's briefly talk about tracking traffic from Google AdWords.
Google Analytics and Google AdWords are connected
so there is no need to manually add campaign tags to your AdWords links.
Adwords auto-tagging automatically populates the five dimensions that we previously discussed,
Campaign, Medium, Source, Content and Keyword.
In addition to these dimensions, autotagging also imports other dimensions specific to
AdWords campaigns, like keyword match type and the ad placement domain.
By default, AdWords auto-tagging is enabled for your account.
So far, we've talked about how to tag and identify traffic from individual campaigns,
sources, and mediums.
But what if you want to bundle some of these activities together
to better reflect how you manage your own marketing strategy?
"Channels" in Google Analytics allow you to organize rule-based groups of traffic
based on your own campaigns, keywords, sources or mediums.
For example, let's say that your email, search and display marketing teams
have created a joint campaign strategy for a summer promotion.
You could define a channel called "Summer Promo"
that groups these coordinated activities together for analysis in your reports.
Google Analytics automatically recognizes several predefined channels.
Some examples of predefined channels are Direct, Email, Social, Organic and Display.
These channels are all part of the predefined Basic Channel Grouping.
You can create your own channel grouping
and redefine these channels according to your own needs.
And, you can define your own additional channels
and add them to the Basic grouping, or to your own custom groupings.
Now let's look at where campaign information shows up in your reports.
To view your data by Source and Medium, use the All Traffic report.
This report includes all the sources and mediums you used in tags
as well default mediums like "organic" and "referral."
Data for your campaigns is in the Campaigns report.
Here, you can see the data for each campaign you used in tags as well as for each AdWords
campaign.
Keywords that you've tagged will show up in the Paid Search keywords report.
Finally, information from the Content tag will also appear in the Campaigns report.
However to see traffic by Content, you need to change the Primary Dimension to Ad Content.
Remember, the campaign tags create standard Google Analytics dimensions.
So you can use these dimensions in many other features, like Custom Reports, Custom Dashboards,
Unified Segments, etc.
How your marketing campaign data appears in your reports impacts how well you can measure
the success of your business.
Be sure to establish best practices within your organization to make sure your campaigns
are tagged consistently.
Now it's your turn to practice creating campaign tags.
Complete the activity in this lesson to apply what you've learned.