Name: Digital Analytics Fundamentals - Lesson 4.5 Collecting campaign data
Uploaded: 2014-03-14T02:38:45.000Z
Duration: 8 min 32 s
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In this lesson we'll explore how Google Analytics collects and reports information about your

We'll also cover how you can track your marketing campaigns.

Let's think back to creating a measurement plan.

One step was to identify the key segments for your business.

A common set of segments that almost every business needs to measure is marketing campaigns

the traffic-driving initiatives that bring customers to your site.

Being able to identify these campaigns and traffic sources in reports

allows you tie your marketing investment to conversions and revenue.

Google Analytics automatically captures a number of attributes, or dimensions,

Two such dimensions are "source" and "medium."

The "source" is the name of the website that referred the user to your site.

For example, if a user clicks over to your site from Google search, the source will be

The "medium" is the mechanism, or "how" the user got to your site.

For example, if a user clicks over to your site from an unpaid search result,

Google Analytics detects three mediums without any customization.

It represents traffic that comes from organic, or unpaid, search results.

Any traffic that comes to your site from another website that's not a search engine

will show up in your reports as a "referral."

This medium is applied only for users that come directly to your site by either typing

your URL into a browser or clicking on a bookmark.

In your reports, you will see these users have a source of "direct" and a medium of

Like social media campaigns, email campaigns, banner ads and other programs?

How do these show up in Google Analytics?

To track campaigns in Google Analytics, you use a process called link tagging.

Link tagging is adding extra information to the links

This extra information that you provide is stored in campaign tags,

and overwrites the default categorization that would normally be assigned to the incoming

For example, let's say that you send a monthly newsletter to your customers.

The newsletter has links that go to your website.

Adding campaign tags to these links allows Google Analytics

to identify that the user came from an email campaign.

There are five campaign tags that you can use.

You'll usually use at least three when tagging links.

The "Source" and "Medium" tags allow you to overwrite the source and medium

that would ordinarily get set by default.

For the newsletter, you might set the source to "julynews" and the medium to "email".

Another campaign tag is called "Campaign."

Use this to name your marketing campaign.

For the newsletter, you might set this to "summersale".

You should always use the Campaign, Medium and Source tags when tracking a campaign.

The last two campaign tags are optional -- "Term" and "Content."

Term identifies the keyword for paid search campaigns.

The Content tag can be used to differentiate versions of an ad.

For example, if you have two different versions of an email newsletter,

you can use the Content tag to differentiate visits from "newsletter1" and "newslette2".

Let's say we have two versions of a display ad.

And let's assume that both ads are running on the exact same site.

The first ad does not have any campaign tags but the second ad does.

they will be identified as referrals coming from the website hosting the display ad.

Google Analytics will not collect any campaign information because there were no tags.

they will be identified as coming from a named campaign,

because the ad contained the campaign tags.

So you can see, if you don't tag your campaigns properly

it can lead to incorrect data in your reports.

You can use a tool called the URL builder to learn how to construct your campaign tags

The tool can be found in the Google Analytics help center.

To use the URL builder, first enter the destination URL for your ad,

which is just the URL where you want a person to land.

Then enter the values you want for each campaign tag.

Use consistent spelling and capitalization when entering tag values.

Since Google Analytics is case sensitive, a campaign named "PROMO1" in all uppercase

will show up separately from a campaign named "promo1" in all lowercase.

Also, standardize on consistent values for your specific mediums,

The URL builder can only construct one URL at a time,

so you probably won't want to use it to construct every URL for every campaign.

If you have a large number of URLs to tag,

you can use a spreadsheet to simplify the process.

Spreadsheets with an embedded formula can make it much easier to generate thousands

Now let's briefly talk about tracking traffic from Google AdWords.

Google Analytics and Google AdWords are connected

so there is no need to manually add campaign tags to your AdWords links.

Adwords auto-tagging automatically populates the five dimensions that we previously discussed,

Campaign, Medium, Source, Content and Keyword.

In addition to these dimensions, autotagging also imports other dimensions specific to

AdWords campaigns, like keyword match type and the ad placement domain.

By default, AdWords auto-tagging is enabled for your account.

So far, we've talked about how to tag and identify traffic from individual campaigns,

But what if you want to bundle some of these activities together

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Digital Analytics Fundamentals - Lesson 4.5 Collecting campaign data

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