How to Track Marketing Campaigns with Google Analytics

When it comes to tracking online success, Google Analytics is really good at doing that and it can help you get insights from your data.

All you have to do is just make sure that you use the proper metrics to measure the outcomes and not look at plain data. The secret is to check the outcomes from the data you have available.

If you are not sure how to do it, don’t worry, by the time you finish reading this article, you will be able to easily apply my advice for your data.

When I say tracking online marketing campaigns, I am referring at a promotion for your eBook, at your latest newsletter, a tweet which promotes an article or your affiliate link shared on Facebook.

You can also track:

• Facebook advertising campaigns
• AdWords campaigns
• LinkedIn ad campaigns
• Microsoft adCenter campaigns

All these can be tracked and measured with Google Analytics, so you can see the performance of your online marketing campaigns.

Once you have data in Google Analytics (GA), you can see the conversion rate for different sources and mediums, check which campaign performs better and where you should put your efforts next time.

To do that, you need to tag your campaigns. Actually you need to tag the URLs that you will be using.

Tag Campign ULs

That’s a really easy and straight forward process and you can use the URL Builder tool from Google to do it. From that page you can easily build the URLs which you can later share on different mediums (email, ppc, referrals).

To make it easier for you to understand, I will use this tool to build an URL for this article, which I will share with my subscribers in the next newsletter.

First, you need to enter the URL that you want to promote.

Then, there are 3 mandatory fields that you need to fill out when building your campaign URL. These fields contain information which Google Analytics will gather and display in the reports:

• Campaign Source – this field is used to identify the source where the traffic is coming from. It can be: google, twitter, facebook, newsletter or a referral name.
• Campaign Medium – this field is used to identify the medium used by your visitors: organic, ppc, email, referral, friend etc.
• Campaign Name – this field should contain an easily identifiable name for your campaign.

Campaign Term and Campaign Content are optional and they are mainly used in AdWords and A/B testing.

Once you fill all the fields, just press the [Generate URL] button and you will get the URL which you can use in your marketing campaign.

Additionally, you can use a service like bit.ly to shorten the URL and hide those campaign parameters.

For my example, the main url is https://eugenoprea.com/google-analytics-campaign-tracking/ and here’s what I will use on each of the mandatory fields:

• Campaign Source – [Eugen Oprea – Free Updates] (this is the name of my newsletter)
• Campaign Medium – email (this is the medium used)
• Campaign Name – GACampaignTracking (an easily identifiable name)

The final URL is this one: https://eugenoprea.com/google-analytics-campaign-tracking/?utm_source=%5BEugen%2BOprea%2B-%2BFree%2BUpdates%5D&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GACampaignTracking

As you can see towards the end of the URL, is better to use only letters & numbers, so avoid using special characters and white spaces.

Check the Google Analytics Campaigns Reports

Based on the data above, here’s how the final result will look like:

Now, once I have some data into my Google Analytics account I will be able to see how many visitors landed on this articles from my campaign and analyze different metrics based on that.

To access the [Campaigns] reports in Google Analytics, go to [Traffic Sources] > [Sources] > [Campaigns].

There you will be able to see how visitors that are coming from that campaign behave on your site and also analyze your conversion rates based on those campaigns.

All these details will help you better understand what are your most successful online marketing campaigns and where you should focus next time.

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Over to you

I hope that this article makes your job easier and it helps you get started measuring your campaigns using Google Analytics. If you have questions or if you would like to share with us the way you’ve build your campaign, please use the comments section below.