If you already appreciate Why You Should Use the Google Analytics URL Builder then below is a short guide on how to use and some things to consider about it’s application.

If you have a look at the Google Analytics URL Builder page you’ll see it’s very simple to use.

Enter the url of your site that you will be directing people to, enter your tracking terms in the fields underneath (only 3 are required) and then click the ‘Generate URL’ button.

Now you just copy the tracking code which appears in the box underneath and use that in your marketing campaign. You don’t need to do anything in GA itself. Just start using the link. Simple!

Here are some things you might find useful for tracking marketing campaigns:

1. Don’t use this tool to track your Adwords campaigns. Instead login to your Adwords account and enable auto tagging which will do it for you.
   
   
2. You will only need to use the Campaign Content field if you want to track various links within a single marketing campaign. For example if you have a mailshot with 1 call to action near the top and another near the bottom then you can use the same tracking link but each with a different Campaign Content term to determine which of the links the visitor used but still tag them all from the same campaign, source and medium.
   
   
3. The campaign name, campaign source and campaign medium and are required fields.
   
   
4. Think of a campaign name being the umbrella term used for a marketing campaign such as Christmas Offer or Valentines Promotion. Within your campaigns you can have lots of sources and mediums.By grouping all your sources and mediums under an umbrella campaign name you can easily glance at a single lined report and see what that campaign acheived for you overall before delving into the details.
   
   Example: You spend £5k promoting a special offer. You glance at your campaign overview report and see it generated 1500 sales, 400 mailing list subscriptions and 200 enquiries. Regardless of where the traffic came from you can decide immediately if the campaign was successfull.
   
   Tips: Don’t use the same campaign name for different campaigns even if they promote the same thing: for example the same offer but a month later. Differentiate it using the month you run it for example or you will get data from the campaigns polluting each other.
   
   
5. Your campaign sources are the places or channels you used in your overall campaign. These could be the sites you advertised on, the names of the companies you used to push our your promotion, the name of the mailing lists you used and so on.
   
   Example continued from above:So you know how much you spent on your campaign and how much it generated for you. By drilling one level deeper into your campaign report you will see a list of the campaign sources down the left hand side of the screen and then a breakdown of the sales, mailing list supbscriptions and enquiries that each source generated for you.
   
   Tips: Keep your source names consistent across all your campaigns. If I advertise on a certain website for every campaign that I do and I always refer to them using the same source name then at the end of the year I can pull up a report showing sales, subscriptions and enquiries across all my campaigns for that source and easily compare it with how much I spent which them that year. This saves you adding up their value from 12 different reports. Not a huge job if you only have 1 source you use but a big deal when you have 2000 marketing channels!
   
   
6. Your campaign mediums are a way to keep track of the type of advertising you did within your campaigns and various sources. These would be things like email, website banner, rss banner, print advert and so on.
   
   Example continued from above:You might advertise with a partnering company (campaign source) but they place a banner on their site, an advert in their monthly electronic newsletter and an advert in their printed office bulletin. You will now be able to drill into your sources to see which mediums they used worked and which didn’t.You might see that overall a source was great but by seeing which sources worked and which didn’t you can reallocate your spending with them.
   
   Tips: Keep your medium names easily recognisable. For example if you start using email1, email2, email3 etc as your naming convention you will never remeber which email you sent out was which within GA. Keep your medium names consistent across your campaigns so that if you ever need to you can pull up a report of all your campaigns and filter the results by medium to find for example how much email marketing contributed to the overall campaign results.
   
   
7. Don’t become lazy and only track some of your marketing. All you will end up with is a GA account you can’t rely on for accurate reporting leading to inaccurate decision making. Generating links is quick and easy.

Please let us know if this guide has helped you. Was there anything you found confusing about the name, source and medium tags when you starting tracking your links? How helpful have you found the reports they provided you with?