Get More from Google Analytics with the Campaign URL Builder

If you’re like me, you’re in Google Analytics every day! It’s an essential part of any online marketing campaign. Then someone introduces you to the URL Builder, and you realize that it could be even better!

Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder can help you:

• Track all your marketing campaigns.
• Discover which offline marketing efforts are working- and which aren’t.

Does this interest you? Great! Let’s begin!

Hold on. Often, I’ve found that people get excited about the URL Builder and jump right in. This can create some problems if you don’t plan things accordingly. Let’s pause for a moment and get organized. This way, the URL Builder will be even more valuable! Here are some common issues to work out!

Consistency is Key

The goal here is to be able to see all your data in one report. To do that, we need to make sure our tagging is consistent. Pay attention to these things:

• Your tags are case-sensitive. GA will report “Facebook” and “facebook” as two different sources for your traffic if you aren’t careful. Pay special attention to abbreviations like “CPC” or “cpc”.
• Spaces between words can make things hard to read. Use hyphens (or underscores, if you must) to make your reports readable and clear. Otherwise, you’ll find URL encoded characters (you’ve seen them: with %20 between words, etc.) which will be hard to read.
• Check Google Analytics and see what someone used previously. For instance, you’ll notice that, by default, Google Ads tags your visitors’ medium as “cpc.” So, if you want to see all your cpc data in one place, be sure to tag your paid search data as “cpc.”
• Turn on automated systems whenever possible. This will make it much easier to implement BUT make sure it’s consistent with the ideas above, or you might have to tag your links manually.
  • Google Ads is very easy. While you’re doing it, double-check to make sure your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts are connected, as well (for even more data).
  • Microsoft Ads can do this by default. If you don’t do this, you’ll see your Microsoft Ads (I keep wanting to call it Bing Ads) come into your Google Analytics as Bing/organic for the source/medium- because GA has no way to distinguish organic from paid Bing visitors. Pro-tip: some scumbag SEO companies will do this to make it look like your SEO campaign is doing better than it is.
  • Mailchimp is straightforward too. The fact that it does this for you makes Mailchimp far superior to systems like Constant Contact- which requires you to do this manually (which is close to malpractice, if you ask me).
  • ActiveCampaign is easy, too.
  • You’ll notice that Facebook is missing from this list. Be sure to manually tag your Facebook campaign (especially your paid ones). This will help you verify and clarify the data they’re sending you and connect your Facebook traffic with your conversion data better- which is the point.
  • Watch-out! Some automated systems add unhelpful parameters to your URL tracking. Adroll sets your source, medium, and campaign all to “adroll”. Not helpful. Not cool.

If you take the time to keep your data consistent, you’ll find the Google Analytics reports much easier to use. That means you’ll use them more!

Make Labels Helpful

Full disclosure: I’m taking these from an old post from LunaMetrics (that’s no longer available). They’re still a great idea, so I wanted to share them with you here.

When considering what to tag your URLs, think about how they will be most helpful to you later. The best way to do this is to make sure your tags each answer questions:

• Medium = What broad marketing channels are you using?
• Source = Who is viewing your content or delivering the viewers?
• Campaign = Why are you targeting these sources and (optional) when?
• Content = Which marketing effort performs better?
• Term = Which keywords perform better?

The best way to explain this is by analogy. For instance, let’s say you’re manually tagging your Microsoft Ads campaign (because you don’t yet realize Microsoft will do it for you). If that’s the case, you will use the following tags:

• What broad marketing channels are you using? Set your medium to “cpc”.
• Who is viewing your content or delivering the viewers? Set your source to “Bing”.
• Why are you targeting these sources and (optional) when? You’d then set your campaign to the campaign name in your Microsoft Ads campaign.
• Which marketing effort performs better? Set your content to represent the difference between different ads in your Microsoft Ads campaign.
• Which keywords perform better? You’d then set your term to the keyword on which you’re bidding.

This makes sense, I hope. How would we apply this to an email campaign- such as manually tagging links in a Constant Contact email?

• What broad marketing channels are you using? Set your medium to “email”.
• Who is viewing your content or delivering the viewers? Set your source to “Constant-Contact” (notice the hyphen to prevent the space!)
• Why are you targeting these sources and (optional) when? You’d then set your campaign to the name of your email campaign. For example: “March-2021-One-Thing”.

The following two options for UTM tracking are optional:

• Which marketing effort performs better? Set your content to represent different links on your email to see which one they’re clicking. For example, “logo-hero” or “logo-footer”.
• Which keywords perform better? Email campaigns don’t have a keyword, silly! Skip it.

Do you see how helpful this could be?

Plan Ahead

Don’t just consider what you’re doing today. Think about how you might do it in the future.

For example, I frequently speak at conferences. I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t just do that to help share knowledge. I hope to grow my business. That’s why, at the end of my presentation, I create a trackable URL using Google’s URL builder. Since the UTM codes can be overwhelming (and easy to confuse), I simplify this with a redirect. For instance, I might create a URL ending in the conference’s name (/wordcamp) that simply redirects to a landing page using the UTM codes. Since I know one of my growth strategies is to do this regularly, I use a standard UTM code format:

• What broad marketing channels are you using? Set your medium to “speaking”.
• Who is viewing your content or delivering the viewers? Set your source to “WordCampATX” (if I use capital letters here, please remember, we need to always do that- even at different WordCamps)
• Why are you targeting these sources and (optional) when? You’d then set your campaign to the name of your email campaign, for example, “202010” (representing October of 2020).

For the next conference, I only need to change the source (to the name of the next meeting) and the campaign to the date. If I keep things consistent, then I can always sort my GA data by medium to see the impact of all my “speaking” engagements.

Another way of doing this is to consider all offline efforts together. For instance, I have pens and business cards. I have set up redirecting UTM codes for these that set:

• The medium to “offline” since the business cards and pens exist in meatspace, not the internet.
• The source is set to the kind of item that contains the code: whether “business-card” or “pen”.
• The campaign is set to the version of the item. For instance, when I run out of business cards, I might put the campaign to the year-month (202104, for example) I first started using that card. This will allow me to see the differences in how different business card versions perform.

While we’re talking about planning, I’ll bring up something I discovered recently. If you use Cloudflare to serve and protect your website, you limit the number of characters in your URLs. I found this after I sent an auto-tagged email campaign. Unfortunately, people could not view a page on my website because the tracking URL was too long. It just served a blank page! I learned that I needed to plan and make sure my tracking parameters weren’t too long. They should be descriptive but concise. Pay heed!

Understand the Limitations

Let’s pause a moment to consider what’s going on with the UTM codes we add. If Google Analytics finds a URL with a UTM code in it, it overrides the session attribution data to whatever you’ve set it to say.

There are a couple of things to consider here.

Never use UTM codes in internal links within a website. If you do, you’ll not only inflate the number of sessions (because sessions will start over), but you’ll also lose the source of the traffic to your website (instead, you’ll see the session attributed to the new source/medium).

One time I saw an over-eager marketer attempt to track how people were interacting with a menu on a site, using UTM codes. While I appreciate their desire to see which items in a menu people wanted to use- and which they were not using- the UTM codes were the wrong way to do this! Every time someone clicked on a link in the menu, the session started over! Sure, they knew someone used that item in the menu, but they inflated their sessions (making it look like they had more visits than they had). They also lost the original source of traffic (losing the ability to attribute goals to the original source/medium). They should have used event tracking or A-B tests (like Google Optimize) to do this. Please don’t repeat their mistake.

Another thing to consider (and this is the SEO in me worrying about this) is your pages’ canonicity. Be sure you have proper canonical tags set on each page of your website. This prevents Google from indexing URLs with tracking parameters (which would falsely attribute organic search traffic to the indexed URL with tracking parameters). It also contains duplicate content issues (where people can view the same content but from different pages). When you have two different URLs with the same content, you allow Google to decide which URL to enter into its index- and sometimes Google chooses the wrong URL. Besides that, it dilutes your link equity between two different URLs, not allowing each to “rank” well. In other words, before you start using UTM codes on your site, be sure your canonical tags are correct. If you can’t use canonical tags on your site, you can exclude UTM codes from within Google Search Console (but be careful).

Document everything

To help keep your UTM codes consistent, helpful and to help you plan ahead, you should document everything. This will help you remember what you’ve used in the past, so make sure you keep using the same ideas in the future. Here are some tips to help:

• Google Analytics has a very helpful spreadsheet that will help you create UTM tracking codes in bulk and serve as an archive of old UTM codes.
• Your campaign report (under Attribution) can help see what you’ve used in the past. Just set your date to a long period to see all the campaigns you’ve manually set- so you can remember what you’ve done (or someone else has done before you) and remain consistent.

Tangent: so much of good marketing is about being organized. Take time to document everything, and I promise you’ll see better marketing performance later!

Test everything

I’ve seen it before. Learn from my mistakes: be sure to test your URLs before you launch your campaign. There’s no telling how your server, CDN, CMS, or something else might handle these URLs. At the same time, it is disappointing that this will temporarily inflate your data (these test visits will show up in your GA account). That’s better than launching a campaign that is untrackable at all. Or worse: people can’t even see your webpage after visiting your tracked URL.

Also, make sure you’re not passing through redirects with your tracking URL. Specifically, make sure you’re adding your tracking code to the canonical URL that resolves to the page’s final version after all redirects. That doesn’t seem to be clear, so here are some things to watch out for:

• Does your website redirect non-www URLs to www?
• Does your website use HTTPS (using an SSL certificate) or HTTP?
• Do URLs add a slash (or remove it) to the end of a URL?

Test your site out and see what the URL resolves to without the UTM code before adding your UTM codes. Some sites might remove parameters (which is the technical term for your UTM codes) through redirects.

By the way- if a page on your website can be viewed with or without any of these variations, generating the same page, you might have a canonicalization problem that could be hurting your SEO efforts. Fix that, too.

Conclusion: UTM Codes are Powerful if done right

I hope all these rules (and mistakes I’ve made) don’t discourage you from using UTM codes in your marketing efforts. I love UTM codes. If you’ve made it this far, you see the potential as well. Learn from my experience, however, and make sure you set them up correctly. If you do, you’ll have the following advantages:

• You’ll make better marketing decisions because you’ll have precise data.
• You’ll look better at your boss because you’ll be able to prove the effectiveness of your efforts.
• You’ll stop wasting time on ineffective campaigns because you’ll see what’s not working.
• The next time your boss has a bad idea for marketing, you’ll be able to show them what it accomplished (or didn’t).