Google Analytics

Marketing Campaign Tracking

Another important part of setting up Google Analytics correctly is the identification of all URLs used in online marketing. Unlike other configuration steps, marketing campaign tracking is not done in the Google Analytics administrative interface or on your web site. Marketing campaign tracking involves changing the links used in your marketing activities. I'll discuss this more in a moment.

The reason why marketing campaign tracking is so important is that, by default, Google Analytics places your visitors in three basic referral segments:

organic

Visitors who click on a search engine results page

referral

Visitors who click on a link on some other web site

direct

Visitors who go directly to your web site by typing the URL into their browsers

While these segments are useful, they do not identify paid marketing activities. You want to measure paid marketing activities so you can better understand if they're successful! This can only be done with via marketing campaign tracking.

How It Works

Marketing campaign tracking is based on the process of link tagging, which is adding extra information to the destination URLs used in your online marketing activities. The extra information is actually a number of query-string parameters that describe the marketing activity. I've illustrated how link tagging identifies your marketing activity in Figure 29.

Figure 29. How link ...