Understanding Campaign Tagging in Google Analytics for Effective Marketing (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Marketing campaigns can take several forms. Your business may want to advertise using text ads on search engine results, banner ads placed on strategic publisher websites, or you may have social media or email campaigns that communicate your brand and products to customers. It's common to use a combination of these marketing activities to drive sales and website conversions. Marketing campaigns are tracked in Google Analytics through campaign tagging. Campaign tags are extra bits of information that you add to the URL links of your online marketing or advertising materials. These include tracking parameters followed by an equal sign and a single word or hyphenated words that you designate. When users click on a link with an added parameter, the Google Analytics tracking code will extract the information from the link and associate that user and their behavior with your marketing campaign. That way, you can know which people came to your site through your various marketing activities. For example, the Google Store has a monthly email newsletter it sends to its customers with links back to the Google Store website. Adding a campaign tag of email to these links allows the store to easily identify the users that came to the website from the email newsletter. There are five different campaign tags that help you identify specific information about your campaign traffic. Medium, Source, and Campaign are required campaign tags. You can also add tags for content and term. Medium communicates the mechanism or how you sent your message to the user. You could include email for an email campaign, CPC for paid search ads, or social for a social network. Source communicates where the user came from. This could be a specific web page or a link in an email. Source could also differentiate the type of medium. So if the medium was CPC or cost-per-click paid traffic, the source might be Google, Bing, or Yahoo. If the medium was email, the source might be Newsletter. Campaign can communicate the name of your marketing campaign, such as 2015 Back to School or 2015 Holiday Sale. Content can be used to differentiate versions of a promotion. This is useful when you want to test which version of an ad or promotion is more effective. If you're running a test between two different versions of a newsletter, you might want to label these tags V1 $10 off and V2 no promo, to help differentiate which newsletter the data is associated with in Google Analytics. Term is used to identify the keywords for paid search campaigns. You would only use this field if you were manually tagging a paid search campaign like Bing or Yahoo. We'll talk about the best way to track Google AdWords in a later lesson. To add these parameters into the URLs associated with your ads, Google Analytics provides a tool called URL Builder in our Help Center, which we'll cover next. Thanks for watching.