Advanced Analysis with URL Parameters

By simply linking your website to Google Analytics, you can, for example, check the number of impressions and clicks. But what if you're inviting visitors to the same landing page from different sources and you want to know which source is bringing you the most? You can also check that, but you need to tweak your URL a bit.

For a clearer understanding, let's use the example below.

You are promoting your campaign on various channels – on the Facebook social network, via email, using ads (Google Ads), on ads from external providers. If you don't have the URL parameters properly set up, Google Analytics will only record the total clicks from all channels. To avoid this, you can use a tool like the URL Builder.

The URL Builder is a tool that allows you to add different parameters to the basic URL (e.g., http://www.example.com). Parameters (also called UTM or tags) are all the tags following the question mark symbol (?): utm_source, utm_medium, utm_content, utm_campaign.

The URL Builder lets you add parameters to any URL by:

• Campaign Source (utm_source): with this tag, we define the source of the visit – e.g., Facebook, Google, Twitter,
• Campaign Medium (utm_medium): with this tag, we specify the advertising medium – e.g., cpc, email, post, ad,
• Campaign Name (utm_name): we can give the campaign a name – e.g., 48hour_sale
• Campaign Term (utm_term): we can mark the words we are advertising on on the URL,
• Campaign Content (utm_content): a tag useful for A/B testing.

Of course, you can omit any of the tags.

You can easily get a URL with all the tags by entering all the necessary data into the URL Builder and copying the URL.

A URL with tags provides key information about the channel through which you drove traffic to your site: the type of campaign and the key word. This advertising method is recommended for use in all marketing activities where analytical data is important for us.

Examples of campaign tagging:

Facebook: when tagging campaigns on the Facebook social network, use Campaign Term.

Example: www.example.com/?utm_term=women_20-30_interest_fashion

Email: as a source (source), tag it as an email and Google Analytics will categorize the visit source into the Email channel by default. Larger providers for mass email campaigns already allow automatic tracking in Google Analytics.

Example: www.example.com/?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=07052017 (we added the date of the sent email as the campaign name)

External advertising: for the source (source), determine the advertiser and the format – e.g., advertising with banners on the 24ur portal.

Example: www.example.com/?utm_source=24ur&utm_medium=banner

An exception is Google Ads, which has automatic campaign tagging and integration with Google Analytics.

After properly setting the utm_source or utm_medium tag, check the analytical data. Monitor analytics as often as possible, as the URL Builder is an excellent tool that provides a precise overview of various performance indicators; you can obtain valuable information during the campaign.