When launching a campaign, it is necessary to track your results in the most detailed way. More specific: You should be able to analyze the traffic and conversion from the campaign page (e.g. e-mail or affiliate site) to your website, and beyond. E-mail applications for example, mostly possess the features to track campaign traffic from the e-mail that has been sent until the website. Google Analytics can be an useful tool to track traffic and conversion beyond that, namely from the sent e-mail to the landing page of the website and further pages. Hence it is important that your campaigns are 100% Google Analytics compatible, and you know how to interpret the reports. In order to achieve this, follow these 3 steps:
1. Provide all the campaign links with the right utm-tags
The URL Builder for Google Analytics shows the two obligatory tags: utm_source & utm_medium. De tags will be displayed in the following report:
By default, Google Analytics shows of course referrals, organic search and direct traffic. The blurred field shows a custom made e-mail campaign: utm_medium = e-mail, the blurred name of the campaign = utm_source). These tags should be assigned to all the links in the e-mail newsletter that direct to your website.
2. Individual content tags
When we go one level more in-depth of the campaign tags, we should also provide a utm_campaign tag to the content of the campaign. To stay with the e-mail example: all the content blocks in the newsletter should posses a different utm_campaign tag. I prefer further to assign a week / month & year number in this tag, so the content blocks are measured every period the campaign is executed and they can be analyzed in relation to each other. An example utm_campaign can be: promo1_w35_y2010
3. Pivot table in Google Analytics > Sources > Campaigns
Now, or final step is to explore this utm_campaign tag in the Analytics report, and the results of it. That means, by default the campaign report in Google Analytics only seems to show a ranking of the different utm_tags. But when they are selected individually, and dissected in a pivot table for landing pages we get:
Try it yourself, and find out which landing pages are visited most on your website from your campaigns. An ideal way for judge the success of the campaing!
amy africa
28-02-2011 06:01Keep on keeping on. If you want some tips, drop me an email and Id be happy to scvhool you.