- Which of our campaigns are driving traffic to our website?<\/li>
- How effective is each step of our integrated cross-media campaign? How many people responded to the direct mail, the emails, and the social media posts?<\/li>
- Which is more effective, social media or email marketing?<\/li>
- How can we see what is working and what isn\u2019t?<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Now that you have Google Analytics running on your website you can answer questions like these by adding \u201clink tags\u201d to your campaign URLs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
The Benefits<\/b><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Link tagging allows you to measure the performance of each campaign and each marketing channel in each campaign and across all campaigns. <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can tell without question how social media is driving traffic to your website, how email marketing is performing, and the success of each campaign. You can test changes, allowing you to continually improve your marketing. You can quit spending money on channels that aren\u2019t working, or work to improve performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You are no longer marketing in the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
View Your Campaigns<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.modernostrategies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/GA01_campaigns3.png\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nYou can view all your campaigns by clicking on Campaigns under the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics. This shows visitor sessions over time as well as a bar chart that shows where the traffic came from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can select a bar chart view by clicking on the icon indicated by the arrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
View Traffic From a Single Campaign<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.modernostrategies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/GA02campdetail3.png\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nHere are the details you get when drilling into a single campaign. When viewing a single campaign you can see the detailed Source and Medium that drove traffic to your website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this case we see that email marketing drove the most traffic, LinkedIn generated the second most traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
View the Traffic Source<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.modernostrategies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/GA03src3.png\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nSource<\/strong> shows which detailed sources are driving traffic to your website. The spikes in the timeline indicate this company is doing very short lived campaigns, such as an email newsletter approximately every six weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this example campaign traffic was pretty evenly split between ad\u2019s purchased on another website coded dwf<\/strong> and the company\u2019s email newsletters. Ads taken out in in the DWF Newsletter<\/strong> did not perform well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
View the Marketing Channels Sending Traffic<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.modernostrategies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/GA04med3.png\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nYou can also see the results of each Medium<\/strong>, or marketing channel, that you use. You can see in this example that for this company email is the only channel that drove any significant campaign traffic to the website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This company had just begun their social media efforts at the time this snap shot was taken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
View the Source of Traffic for a Particular Campaign<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.modernostrategies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/GA05src3.png\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nThis short time, time bound campaign was limited to a couple of social media channels. Facebook generated three times the traffic as LinkedIn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even more important: who converts into customers? We will discuss goals, conversions, and funnels in a future blog post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once a culture of measuring performance takes hold, you will naturally find yourself spending less of your efforts and marketing dollars on \u201cawareness\u201d and \u201cbranding\u201d campaigns that can\u2019t directly be measured. There may still be a need for these campaigns, but expect them to consume less of your marketing budget over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What is Link Tagging?<\/b><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Link tagging is adding extra information to the URLs, or hyperlink. Google Analytics uses these tags to show you exactly what is driving traffic to your website. This extra information does make the URL complicated and ugly, but there are ways to hide this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here’s an example of a URL with link tagging:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To get these benefits you need to add a campaign name<\/b>, the medium<\/b> used, and source<\/b>. There is also an optional content<\/b> tag. Google Analytics uses a term<\/b> tag when tracking online advertising, but you can ignore this as it is handled automatically by advertising platforms like Google Adwords.<\/p>\n\n\n\n