The single most important objective behind any online marketing campaign is to drive traffic to your site. However, it is important for companies to know which of their marketing efforts are yielding the most positive results and which campaigns are not working at all.
Without information on the latter, they would keep making efforts towards campaigns that are useless for their business.
Best Analytics Tool
The best tool companies can use to track the performance of different marketing campaigns is Google Analytics. Besides the fact that Google Analytics is just simply amazing, it is also free!
Using top-notch analytical tools like, Google Analytics allows you to see which of your marketing campaigns are driving the most individuals to your site.
If you are running Marketing Campaigns like:
• Facebook PPC Ads
• Email Marketing
• Twitter to Generate Leads
• Search Engine Optimization
Every marketing campaign you do, needs to be tracked. Otherwise you have no clue what is working or not.
By default, Google Analytics tracks visitors from three channels [Organic Traffic, Referral Traffic and Direct Traffic]. However, if you are looking for more detailed information, you can add custom tags to classify different campaigns.
How to Track Different Marketing Campaign Successes
In order to track the performance of each of your marketing campaigns, you can use the URL Builder tool offered by Google.
The tool will create a custom URL for each campaign, allowing you to include it to the campaign assets. Now using this tool is extremely simple if you understand the perimeters mentioned.
Google URL Builder
First, you have to add the URL of the website that you want to promote in the campaign or a landing page to the URL you want to promote.
After that, you have to fill out certain perimeters which are:
Campaign Source:
This identifies the source from which the traffic is coming to your site, i.e. newsletters, Google or Facebook.
Campaign Medium:
This identifies the medium used for advertising, such as email, display ad or content.
Campaign Term:
This defines the paid search keywords used in a campaign. It should be used to specify keywords if you are manually tagging them in the campaign.
Campaign Content:
Campaign content is used to differentiate two links within one campaign so that you can know which link is used more by the visitors.
Campaign Name:
This is the name you give to the specific campaign that you are tracking.
Source, medium and name are mandatory while others are optional and can be used in case of specific campaigns.
Once you have filled out these parameters, simply click on the “Submit” button to get a custom URL for that particular campaign.
The URL will look like:
ignitedigital.ca/?utm_source=Blog%20Post&utm_medium=Blog&utm_campaign=Google%20URL%20Tracker
Make that Link Smaller and Attractive!
Using a service like bit.ly, you can shorten this URL to look like:
-
- Include it in your online marketing campaigns.
- Once the link is included, you will start getting results you can effectively track. You will be able to track how many visitors on your specified webpage are coming in from a particular source.
- When inside Google Analytics click on “Acquisition” and then click on “Campaign“. Below is a screenshot of what you’ll see on yours, our sources are blurred (don’t want to give away any top-secret tactics! ? )
This will tell you which of your campaigns are faring better than others and point out which campaigns you need to improve or cut off completely.
