One of the most useful features in Google Analytics is its ability to track your online marketing campaigns. We all know that GA works great with AdWords, but it can also be used to track your banner ads, CPC ads and even your off line ads (which I’ve posted about before). If you’re doing any online advertising you should be tracking its performance at the most granular level possible.
With that said, I’ve put together a series of posts that will dive into Google Analytics Campaign Tracking. I wanted to preface the series with a ‘summary’ post so people know where I’m going.
I explain the technology behind Google Analytics link tagging. Don’t worry, this isn’t too technical and it is really important stuff to know.
Part 2: EpikOne Link Tagging Tool
I’ll give you guys access to an internal tool that we use to manage our link tagging effort. Hopefully this tool will save everyone some time.
We put our knowledge to work and start looking at some reports.
Part 4: Tips & Best Practices
This is a brain dump. Everything I’ve learned in the past 2 years about tracking online campaigns with Google Analytics.
So sit back, relax and get ready.
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just a quick question. I know we can use GA to be able to allow you to track click on outbound links using the following:
My question is will this count towards the number of actual pageviews??
If it does then I will always have to factor those hits out when looking at my total pageviews, which can get annoying!
Will you use link tagging to track internal campaigns??
I believe the information from external and internal campaigns will be corrupt, then.
BTW, very nice and usefull blog, congratulation.
Hi kakoky,
Personally, I would not use link tagging to track internal campaigns. The reason is that the data will overwrite the external campaign information.
If you don’t care about the external referral information then you could use it, but it really depends on your specific needs.
Justin
In your opinion, how do you think I should be tracking internal campaigns or promotions?
Hi Kakoky,
It really depends what’s important to you and your analysis needs. Many people use GA’s campaign tracking to track internal campaigns. The down side is you loose the original referrer information. You can also use GA custom segmentation feature, but this would require some custom coding to make sure you’re setting and updating the custom segment value at the correct time.
Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful, but the solution will depend on your needs.
Thanks for reading and thanks for the comment.
Justin
Can u tell me how to exclude traffic from our machine in Google Analytics. I know how to do with IP. Can u tell me any other way using JS file or…..
Can u tell me how to trach pdf document and media file in GA
Hi Alder,
Check out this series of posts about tracking visitor clicks. That’s what you need to do to track PDF files and other non-HTML files.
As for excluding traffic from GA, the best way to do it is using a filter based on IP address. If you can’t do that then try this technique.
Thanks for reading and thanks for the questions,
Justin
Is it possible to tag a link in your email campaign so that the users email address shows up in Ad Content or User Defined fields? I understand it’s against GA policy.
Thanks,
Cam
Hi Justin,
I’d like to know whether it’s possible to use event tracking in the case of internal banner campaigns on an e-commerce website. In other words: how can be determined which products are being bought through banners on the homepage?
I know that I have to use event tracking to measure the clicks on the internal banners, but can we take a next step to measure what’s being bought after that click?
Thanks.
Anemone,
Yes, you can. In fact we’ve done it in the past. The event tracking reports have a Commerce tab that will show downstream transactions that happen after events occur. You don’t get super detailed reports, but you can see total revenue, AOV, etc.
What you need to do is create some type of event when the ad click happens.
Hope that helps,
Justin