Your Google® Game Plan for Success: Increasing Your Web Presence with Google AdWords, Analytics, and Website Optimizer

Chapter 18. Programs to Add to Your Game Plan Outside Google

The online world isn't closed to anything non-Google. Yes, Google is great and provides incredible advertising and analysis tools at a bare minimum of expense. However, some tools, programs, and applications that live outside the Google ecosystem are also great and very cost-effective. This final chapter of Your Google Game Plan for Success is dedicated to talking about programs that are not under the Google umbrella.

Since you're most likely using Google Analytics (or heavily considering it after reading through this book), you're going to need to know how to integrate other marketing programs into Google Analytics. Google AdWords can sync with your Google Analytics account and export data for your analysis and segmenting (something you learned about in Chapter 14). For other advertising platforms, like MSN AdCenter, or any newsletter promotions sent out to your subscriber base, or any links that you've shared with other website owners, you'll have to do a bit of work and build links that will pass referral information from the visitor to Google Analytics. I call this "manual URL tagging," and we'll kick this chapter off by showing you how to build your URLs for Google Analytics.

Manual URL Tagging

Manual URL tagging is the process of building your links in your non-Google advertising efforts, so that Google Analytics can organize your data in a clean and concise manner. The most important places where you'll most definitely ...