Thanks for the great post. Love your book. Three questions:

1. In your example above, does http://www.backtoschooljeans.com have to be real web page, or can it just be a URL set up for the sole purpose of redirecting to another page?

2. In Google Analytics, on my Campaigns report, (direct) is listed as one of the campaigns. Why is that?

3. What happens if people bookmark the URL with all of the campaign parameters? Won’t that skew our results in Google Analytics?

Thanks!

I’m not sure I understand exactly what the question is, but it seems like you want to only have GA track certain data based on date. You could do this, but you would need to customize the GA code to execute only if the date meets your conditions. This would be done by wrapping the GA JavaScript with some type of logic.

Hope that answers your question,

Justin

_uacct = “UA-1717048-1″;
urchinTracker();

I’ve created my new redirect: http:/www.cie.org.uk/preuenglish

…and have made sure it points to the following page successfully…

http://www.cie.org.uk/qualifications/academic/uppersec/preu/subjects?utm_source=classroom_feb&utm_medium=magazine&utm_campaign=preuenglish

Problem is that I have clicked on the new link via a number of PCs (all outside my network) over the last two days and these clicks are not being tracked. The advert is going live in print magazine tomorrow. I am worried that tracking isn’t working. Could it be the old tracking code? Or just a delay in my clicks being picked up. Hmm…

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks

David

Zeros for certain metrics can be caused by a few things. A filter might be creating the problem or you may be updating the campaign variable during a visitors session. For example, some people try to use link tagging to track internal banners, etc. That usually causes a zero-data problem

I would check that first.

Hope that helps and thanks for the question,

Justin

Your URL will not work. You need to use thee core variables:

utm_campaign
utm_medium
utm_source

You can rename them, but that’s a bit more complicated. Check out this post for more information about link tagging:

http://www.epikone.com/blog/2006/11/10/google-analytics-campaign-tracking-pt-1-link-tagging/

Thanks for the question,

Justin

I’d much more prefer to just add some info on the URL string from the banner to be able to track via Google analytics. I do see they have a tool to create a url but do I need to keep with that exact format?

Google’s tool creates this:
http://www.mydomain.com/internalpage.aspx?utm_source=banner&utm_medium=108

Will this work just fine?
http://www.domain.com/internalpage.aspx?banner=108

I have actually used the 2nd sample but can’t seem to see any data referencing those variables in my Analytics account.

You bring up a good point. There is no way to insure that a person will enter a vanity URL into the location bar browser. We have very little control over the organic data in a search engine.

However, one thing you may want to try is running an AdWords campaign in the same geographic region as your offline campaign.

There are so many things that can go wrong. I think the thing to remember is that this technique is meant give you a general feel for how an offline campaign is going and not an exact measurement of performance.

Justin