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Do you ever wonder how your other online marketing campaigns are performing? Do you know if your efforts are resulting in sales? Take the mystery out of your online marketing initiatives with Google Analytics.

While Google Adwords campaigns are automatically tagged to provide conversion metrics in both Adwords and Analytics, many of your other online advertising and marketing could go unrecongnized. This is where manually tagging your online campaigns is vital factor prerequisite to enabling Google Analytics to show you which of your marketing campaigns are bearing fruit.   Manually tagging your campaigns involves adding, defined specific variables into the links that lead to your website.

What can and should be tagged? Generally all of your paid keyword links, your banners, badge and other ads. You may also want to measure the performance of your email campaigns by tagging links inside your promotional emails. The great thing with tagging your campaigns, the tagging process goes smoothly once you understand how to differentiate your campaigns. In addition, Google Analytics provides a URL Builder tool, as shown below to make it easy to tag your links for your campaigns.

URL-Builder_screenshot

As you may notice with the screen shot above, there are core components to tagging your campaigns. Below, as found on the Google url tag building tool, is a more detailed breakdown to what is being tagged. In this way, each of these elements are then able to track and most importantly report in Google Analytics on the traffic from your campaign sources.

Variable Name Description
utm_source Source Every referral to a web site has an origin, or source. Examples of sources are the Google search engine, the AOL search engine, the name of a newsletter, or the name of a referring web site.
utm_medium Medium The medium helps to qualify the source; together, the source and medium provide specific information about the origin of a referral. In the case of a newsletter source, examples of medium include “email” and “print”.
utm_term Term The term or keyword is the word or phrase that a user types into a search engine.
utm_content Content The content dimension describes the version of an advertisement on which a visitor clicked. It is used in content-targeted advertising and A/B Split Testing to determine which version of an advertisement is most effective at attracting profitable leads.
utm_campaign Campaign The campaign dimension differentiates product promotions such as “Spring Ski Sale” or slogan campaigns such as “Get Fit For Summer”.

If you were to create a visual of tagging an email campaign, it would look something like this:

Campaign Source: Newsletter8
Medium:  Email
Campaign Term: August2010
Campaign Name: product123

An example of a url built out to tag a campaign might look like this:

https://www.thinkprofits.com/?utm_source=Newsletter8&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=August2010&utm_campaign=product123

Once you have tagged your campaigns, you can easily view and assess the performance of your campaigns, the mediums and even specific keywords. In this way, at a glance you can see for yourself whether the link in your blog, that timely email campaign, site link or banner is not only driving traffic to your site, but can also measure the dollar value of customers for those specific campaigns.