[This is a transcription from the Clickx Marketing Hack of the Day video series.]
Understanding Your URLs In Campaign URL Builder
Hey I’m Solomon with Clickx. For today’s Harketing Hack of the Day, I want to teach you about Campaign URL Builder. I think it is really, really important that when you go to Google Analytics, you want to run some reports on your traffic, you should be able to understand what URLs are helping you get the traffic, the leads, and the conversion that you are looking for and which ones are not! See, Google Analytics has the tendency to take all of your aggregate data, often times they will report it as direct traffic.
If you are doing email campaigns with multiple email providers, not just yourself, you are paying other people to send emails to their list you will all get clumped up into what is called just email. So you do not really have anyway of understanding whether it is your own social media campaign you did, if is a paid one, if it is a third party email newsletter, or it is even display ads you are doing, or Facebook ads. There is no way to track it unless you yourself go and create a custom tracking URL with these parameters, which I will explain to in a minute, and then submit that URL to whomever you are paying! Then you will be able to get the report that you want right inside Google. So that’s what I want to talk about today. So let’s get right to it, alright?
Setting Up Your URL Builder System
So there is a couple of things that you have to fill out right inside Google’s URL builder, and this whole entire URL builder system is also built into Clickx, so you do not have to go to Google Analytics every time, you want to get a custom URL out to your third party vendor or your social media campaigns or anything like that. So for campaign source, I will tell you first off, your website would be the first thing that you would punch in whatever your domain name is. So it is like “www.mysite.com.” Then after that, you would want to punch in your campaign source. An example of campaign source would be Facebook, or it would be Google, or it would be something like Twitter, or LinkedIn. You really want to track the source. So for a campaign medium, it might be like cost per click, or PP, or it might be an email campaign that you are doing. It will be something very similar to that you want to track, right? It could be a banner, it could be email, and it is cost per click. And for the campaign name, you might want to put something like: This is my spring sale, or this is my new product launch, this is a referral from such-and-such site. This is what it is going to be called, so you have a referral partner who is going to send your traffic, you would put the name of that campaign right there! Sounds good! And then finally if you are actually testing different terms, so if you say you are testing this word versus that word. Alright! You want to know whether people like this word or that word, you would put the actual term so you would have to create a different URL for the other term of course!
Carefully Analyze Every Result
And then the campaign content would be the different kinds of ads that you have. Again, the law, the more you get into it the more information you get, but what I need to see marketers do more of just get the top. At least the three or four of them will give you plenty of information inside Google Analytics, rather than having to go down the term in the content level. But of course, if you can get this whole thing together, down to a science. You have a much better way of understanding, what is bringing your money, in how you are going to invest more of that money into something that is going to get you the results that you are looking for, rather than spreading your budget across so many different campaigns. Whether it is doing sort of like display ads, or third party display, or email marketing promoted email campaign, paper lead programs. You got all this stuff, but you really do not understand what is working for you; what is generating the conversion! I would work on this immediately, because like I said I am always getting emails about: “Hey! Can you look at this? Hey! Can you check this out?” I am looking into Google Analytics, and I cannot tell anything! I am like look this, “Google Analytics is not giving me any idea as to what is working for you in your campaigns,” and that is what I would focus on in your upcoming campaigns!
Obviously it is too late, because Google Analytics only has historical data. You cannot go back into anything that has happened in the past in terms of your display campaigns your email, your Facebook. But going forward, make it a habit to go through every single time. Now, I understand if you have a hundred things that is going on is going to take you hundreds of URLS. But you have to make sure that you are going to do it for the big ones, the one that is going to cost you tens and thousands of dollars. Make sure that that is being tracked extremely carefully as methodical as you can, not one version with capital letters in another version with lowercase. That is going to report as two not one!
Record All of Your Information, Its Not Optional Anymore
So, you really want to make sure these URLs are kept in a sheet of some sort and shared with the entire team. You can really aggregate this data when you get the data in Google Analytics. Alright? So and one of the ways that you can actually see page level information is to go to Google Analytics and on the left-hand side you are going to click on content, in-site content, and all pages. Once you do that, you will be able to see a list of pages and find the landing page of your campaign. Once you have your landing page selected, you can select the secondary dimension pull down menu and then you can see source in medium. What that allows you to do is you can really track, how these top landing pages are getting visits based on the URL the builders that you have built. So again, whether it is tracking your email signature, whether it is tracking your social media campaigns, which I highly recommend you do, especially if you are doing a promoted tweet or a promoted post on LinkedIn or in boosting a post on Facebook, you really want to know that you are getting your money’s worth and not just we are seeing the numbers that Facebook reports you or Twitter reports you, but right inside your Google Analytics. And also take a look at these top landing pages and figure out how those top landing pages are getting traffic from which one of these campaigns sources and medium. Very important information like I said, today’s marketer must be extremely analytical and it is not an option anymore, it has to be deeply rooted into the person to be able to execute so many things at the same time, and look at the results that it’s generating.
I hope you got some intent to how you can build specific URLs for your campaigns! So that is the hack of the day!
As always, if you have any questions leave it in the comment box.
Thank you for watching another edition of marketing hack of the day.
