For most people learning how to set up URL tracking won’t be anything new, but for the people starting out in Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing, this information can still provide its value, and that’s why we decided to write about it.
Tracking your urls is one of the key elements to measure the results of your marketing efforts. The website you’re tracking gets visits, let’s say from Facebook, and to know what post generated what traffic, URL tracking is a must.
Setting up url tracking:
- First you use a free URL tracking system, we advise you to use Google’s URL builder, since it has the best integration with Google Analytics.
- Insert the address of the landing page you want visitors to go to
- Fill in the Campaign Source (Social Media, Email Marketing, Search etc.)
- Fill in the Campaign Medium (Facebook, Twitter, Newsletter October etc)
- Filling in the Campaign Term and Content is only necessary if you manually tag your urls in ads in search engines or other platforms.
- Lastly, enter your campaign name, where you define exactly the subject of your post or article with the link you want to track, for example: “Article about puppies, Facebook wall post about cats”
- Click on the “generate url” button and copy your flashy tagged url.
And there it is, your beautifully tagged url, from which you can track the visits directly in Google Analytics, which will look something like this:
http://yourdomain.com/page-url-about-animals?utm_source=Email%2BMarketing&utm_medium=Newsletter%2BOctober&utm_campaign=Article%2Babout%2Bcats
After posting your link and after receiving the initial traffic, go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns in Google Analytics, and there you will see the name of the Campaign Source you defined in step 3.
Note: Usually tagged urls tend to be quite long, so we recommend you to pass it through a URL shortener like Goo.gl or Bitly.com.