Receive new blog posts immediately direct to your email inbox!
The ROI Revolution Blog
« Using Google Analytics to find referring URL's | Main | Crummy Conversion Rate Epidemic! »
Google Analytics Link Tagging 101
January 13, 2006
The only way for you to see which advertising media are actually returning your investment is to tag your ads. It's an extremely simple process with Google Analytics, once you're prepared with the basic knowledge on how to categorize your various campaigns.
First, understand that you only tag what you need to tag. Don't confuse yourself, or add unnecessary work. For example, if you need to track a Google AdWords account that is linked with your Google Analytics account, you don't need to tag your AdWords URLs at all. Google Analytics does it automatically. Other paid marketing campaigns like banners, and unpaid media like email campaigns should definitely be tagged.
You can't tag organic results (of course), and depending on how you want to measure any affiliate program you're enrolled in, it's not necessary to tag them either. Search engine traffic will automatically register in Google Analytics, along with keyword metrics. Your referrals for all other sites are also counted, and will be displayed automatically under referral reports.
Use only the tags that you need. In keeping with the above sentiment of avoiding wasteful labor, you don't need to go all-out with tagging variables either. There are five campaign variables, and all can be used with a variety of advertising media. The table below describes each variable. You can hold your mouse over the variable name for more information:
| Banner Ad | Email Newsletter | CPC | |
| Source | foodtv | newsletter0601 | ysm |
| Medium | banner | cpc | |
| Campaign | Restaurant | ThaiBitesNews | Restaurant |
| Term | thai+restaurant | ||
| Content | foodtv_120x240 | newsletter0601a | thai_a |
You certainly don't need to use every single one of these, though. The ones you'll want to become intimately familiar with are Source, Medium, Campaign, and if you're tracking paid keywords, Term. When you're trying to find out which ad creative is performing best, Content can be a great addition to the mix, as well.
Is all of this a little too complex for you? No problem. Use our Google Analytics Destination URL Builder and let us do the work for you. Plug in your variables, click a button, and we'll generate your tagged link. Simply cut and paste into your ad.
If you need even more help with this, then look for our free URL Builder Training Video (opt-in box in the upper right hand side of the page). This is an 11-minute Camtasia video that walks you step by step to using our Google Analytics URL Builder tool.
Interested in learning more about Google Analytics?
Attend our LIVE Google Analytics Seminars for Success training in Atlanta, GA Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 and Thursday, April 15th, 2010 or get the latest tips and tricks sent to you via our free, twice-monthly Google Analytics newsletter.
Posted by Michael Harrison, Analytics and Optimization Specialist at 11:46 AM
Comments
If you need to track a Google AdWords account that is linked with your Google Analytics account, you don't need to tag your AdWords URLs at all. Google Analytics does it automatically.
February 23, 2007 4:48 PM
if you do "go all out", and tag galore... does this give you more time for tracking than without tagging?
October 12, 2007 4:26 PM
If you are sending people to an intermediary page will the tagged link travel through to the final URL?
For example, we are sending people to a informational page, but the shopping cart is located on a different domain.
Any help would be appreciated.
Christiana
March 20, 2008 6:39 PM
said:@Christiana: Unless you set up the intermediary page to redirect the visitor along with the utm parameters, the tracking will not make it through. Also, moving visitors from your site to the shopping cart domain will require use of special linking functions built into Google Analytics.
March 21, 2008 11:14 AM
This looks like a good idea, but I have no idea what to do with this generated tag. If I understand correctly, you can use this to see if an email or newsletter sends someone to one of your website pages. Is that correct? If so, how would you do that?
April 10, 2008 12:52 PM
said:@Gil: You just take the URL that is generated and use it for a link within your email. So, for instance, if you have a link in your email to take visitors to your homepage, you change the URL from just http://www.mysite.com/ to the URL that was generated by the builder.
April 10, 2008 1:07 PM
I noticed that the filter fields included something called "campaign code" with along with the other parameters (campaign source, campaign medium, etc.) I can not find anything that mentions "campaign code" anywhere. Is that a different tracking parameter? If so what is it used for?
May 22, 2008 10:28 AM
said:@Gael: According to the help entry on what information is stored within filter fields, the Campaign Code is:
"The campaign code, defined by the tagged request query, can be used to refer to a campaign lookup table, or chart of referring codes used to define variables in place of multiple request query tags."
Essentially, this variable refers to a campaign lookup table, where you can match up IDs with specific source/medium/campaign combinations and add smaller tags to your URLs. Those of you who used GA back in the Urchin On-Demand days will recall that this was something you could use to convert:
www.mysite.com?utm_source=test&utm_medium=test&utm_campaign=test
Into:
www.mysite.com?utm_id=1443
What Google doesn't mention in that helpfile is that this feature is not yet supported, so don't worry too much about it for the time being. We'll let you know if and when you can start using it again.
May 22, 2008 10:49 AM
In our adwords account there is 2 Seperate Adword Clients set up for one client. NonBrand and Brand
Is there a way to link these to 1 Analytics Account?
Thanks
June 27, 2008 12:57 PM
said:@Jolene: If you're saying that your AdWords login brings you to two unique AdWords accounts, then you might be using an AdWords My Client Center (MCC). MCCs cannot be linked to Analytics accounts.
If, however, you are referring to two different AdWords campaigns (NonBrand and Brand campaigns), then you can link the single AdWords account to the Analytics account.
July 2, 2008 10:48 AM
Hi Mike -
We tagged our banner ads about a week ago with code generated with the Google Analytics URL tool on the GA site, but so far GA does not show any data when we look under the campaign, medium, or source terms. We even did a bunch of click-throughs to make sure we had some activity on them - still nothing.
Any ideas about what might be causing this lack of data?
thanks - misterp
September 24, 2008 7:56 AM
said:@Misterp: Sometimes a redirect on the landing page will strip out the tracking parameters. When you did your clickthroughs, did you notice that the utm parameters were still in place in the browser's location field once the page had loaded?
September 24, 2008 11:52 AM
Mike - Yes, the utm parameters are still in place - nothing is stripped out.
Any other thoughts?
thanks - misterp
October 7, 2008 3:48 PM
Does using this link format reduce the effect of linking for search optimization?
Because the parameters on the links won't match the url that is currently indexed, I am wondering if using this link for inbound link building to boost ranking on the search engines will work. But I would like to know that the traffic comes from my efforts so I can decide to continue or not.
October 9, 2008 4:39 PM
said:@Misterp: Nothing else. Just make sure that the Google Analytics Tracking Code is present on the landing page. Beyond that, I'd have to look at the page in question to tell.
October 14, 2008 10:39 AM
said:@Lou Anne: You should be using the utm parameters on inbound traffic from advertisements and emails. Anything that gets crawled and indexed by search engine spiders will rarely contain the tracking parameters.
That being said, if you are engaged with link building with other sites that will influence Page Rank and the Google search index, you may wish to leave out the utm parameters. Google Analytics will automatically report on referrals to your site, which is enough in most cases.
October 14, 2008 10:51 AM
We understand the URL builder but find it an absolute pain to cut/paste for each and every keyword we offer. Is there a global variable we can use to parse the actual keyword typed for a PPC campaign? If this can be done then we would only need to add one universal string to all our destination urls in a campaign.
We do have "ROI Actual Keyword Typed" script added to our profiles. Will this parse the actual keyword typed for PPC campaigns if we omit the "term variable" from the destination url. This is what we had in mind: http://www.mysite.com?utm_source=msn&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=adcenter If not any other suggestions to simplify this project across multiple PPC venues?
October 25, 2008 4:22 PM
said:@Larry: Depending on the CPC vendor, there might be a global variable that passes the keyword. All of them work differently.
You can exclude the utm_term parameter and trust to the Exact Keyword Tracking script, but this means that you can't segment by "Term" in Google Analytics. It also makes bid term to exact keyword comparisons impossible.
Try using a spreadsheet to build your destination URLs.
October 29, 2008 9:44 AM
Michael, I'm sorry if I need to be spoon-fed but I simply can't find where to see those clickthroughs.
This is the URL I'm trying to click: http://www.wubi.dk/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=testnyhedsbrev
I've tested that I'm on an IP that I didn't filter.
I would imagine that I would be able to find this click somewhere in the "Content" section. However it's not in the full report showing the URL or when viewed by page Title.
What am I missing?
Thanks,
Mikael
October 30, 2008 3:23 PM
said:@Mikael: These tags will never show up in the Top Content report, actually. You'll need to go to Traffic Sources. The source and medium will both display in All Traffic Sources, and the campaign will display in Campaigns. Good luck!
October 30, 2008 3:42 PM
Hi Michael, thank you very much. I still can't find it in the list of Traffic Sources but I can see it in Campaigns and that is what I needed. ;)
Regards,
Mikael
October 31, 2008 12:57 AM
Strike that last remark. I found it in the Traffic Sources also. Thanks again.
Regards,
Mikael
October 31, 2008 12:59 AM
said:@Mikael: Awesome! Let me know if you have any other questions!
November 3, 2008 3:14 PM
We are going to beta test our site, password protected, with 100 users. Can we tag them so that when we go live we can separate the beta test data from the live web traffic that will be generated following the beta test?
November 24, 2008 10:48 AM
said:@Don: Sure, you could certainly do that.
December 17, 2008 3:50 PM
okay so i want to track a banner ad that is running on another site. so i used the google code generator and I embeded the link into the ad. The ad is currently live and i can click on it and it works. The UTM parameters are there. but the links are not showing up on GA. Can you shed any light on this?
January 27, 2009 5:06 PM
said:@paul: Unfortunately, there's not a lot to go on here. Check your cookies after you click and see if they're filled in with the utm parameters. Other than that, may I suggest a Google Analytics support plan? :)
January 29, 2009 2:09 PM
Michael, why are source, medium, and campaign all mandatory fields on the Google Analytics Destination URL Builder?
For something simple like my email signature line, I would think utm_source=email should be sufficient.
Thanks in advance for your advice.
Joe Hage
February 4, 2009 12:13 AM
It seems if you add link tracking to a URL with an anchor (ex: http://www.nafcu.org//Content/NavigationMenu/Events_Education/CEOs_Conference/2009_CEOs_Conference.htm#speakers) that the anchor point will be lost and you will simply go to the top of the page instead of the point on the page you'd like to go to. Is there a way around this, or does it not work with anchor links?
February 26, 2009 9:11 AM
I have a client with a campaign on a TV website. The TV station has given us Google Ad Manager reports for click throughs from links/ads/e-mails which show around 2000 click throughs. When the client pulls up Google Analytics, they only show a handfull of click throughs from this TV website. The client doesn't know who to believe.
March 4, 2009 12:42 PM
Kristen -- a little late but if you're still trying to figure out the anchor, I believe if you put it AFTER the querystring parameters, it will work. for example mysite.com/conference.htm?utm_source=ysm&ut_medium=cpc#speakers... that should do it. Hope this helps.
April 6, 2009 10:18 AM
I am about to run some aquisition email camapign with email vendors and want to track the link and split test the creative. I am paraniod it wont show up, last time I ran a ppc network campaign - nothing showed in GA for that campaign. If this campaign is stand alone (mailing list to opt-in) - with the unique urls (assuming I am split testing), will I just need to set up conversion goals in GA and see the links in the referal traffic logs? (if thatis so straight forward why didnt my ppc traffic show as a referral source?)
July 9, 2009 7:31 PM
I would like some help understanding how to set up my 'tags' in order to receive information about how often visitors to my website click on links I have to my papers. These papers are stored as pdf files in my web site directory, and hyperlinked through their titles. So if someone goes to my webpage /papers.html, then selects one of a dozen titles such as 'paper xyz', clicks it, they will have that paper's pdf file open in a new window. How do I measure which papers, and how often are being selected for viewing?
August 15, 2009 2:09 PM
said:@Ray: Take a look at how to track files that are downloaded from your site in Google Analytics.
August 19, 2009 10:21 AM
Michael, thanks. I did see this already. Problem is I am using a software web site creation tool called SiteBuilder, and it apparently does not allow me to directly edit a page's (or link's) script. It does allow me to insert a html tag in any position on a web page, a feature I have no trouble using at the beginning and ending of each page: those result respectively in a bookmark logo, and a google analytics tracking tag. If I place the new html tag directly on top of the link to one of my papers, it does not work: the link text becomes transparent with the html text when viewing from my browser; and I don't believe a tagging actually happens as I intended.
So the short version of my question is: how do I place a tag in my link when the software does not allow me access to edit the script directly of a page (or link)?
September 2, 2009 5:45 PM
said:@Ray: Check out how to automatically track file downloads at the Measuring Success blog.
September 8, 2009 10:09 AM
Can Google Analytics link tagging be used to track links and the number of leads, number of sales, and $ amount of sales?
Using link tracking, I want to track if a user comes to the site and complete X number of leads, Y number of sales and Z amount of sales. Can this be done?
October 19, 2009 2:40 PM
said:@Ben: Link tagging is used primarily to see how many leads or sales are attributed to a specific advertising channel. Not a user. So if you tag your links, you can use the Traffic Sources reports to get an idea of how many visitors are coming in from those links, as well as whether they are buying or submitting their lead information.
October 21, 2009 10:17 AM
Thanks you, i am using in linking system, optimizing keyword seo. Now 10K user including my web site.
Thank you too.
December 29, 2009 2:36 AM
Hello
I am using Google tracking.
I am particularly interested in utm_term tag.
Do would i use utm_term for non-adwords cpc ?
I am using other forms of cpc apart from adwords, and i want to track which keyword brought up my ad.
is it possible with utm_term
January 2, 2010 5:04 AM
said:@Ibn: With non-AdWords CPC, you'll have to use a macro that automatically plugs in the keyword, or manually tag the ad's destination URL. You may also want to look into remapping your campaign tracking variables to take advantage of built-in variables (Yahoo's, for instance). Good luck!
Hi,
I was wondering, if you use Google AdWords and track them with Google Analytics, is there ever a reason to manually tag these ads?
Thanks!
- Greg Moore
February 23, 2007 11:22 AM