Comments on: Google Analytics Campaign Tracking Pt. 1: Link Tagging

By: Justin Cutroni

Justin Cutroni — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:37:09 +0000

Hi Newbie, if the email is pointing people back to your site then you should tag the links. If you don’t tag the links then how will you know how much traffic you get from the email newsletters? Most email tools have some type of GA plugin that will automatically tag the links for you. Ask your provider. If you’re using a home-grown tool then I suggest you tweak it to automatically tag the links for you.

Hope that helps!

Justin

By: ICTRecht Weblog » Ongevraagde commerciële berichten op Twitter zijn ook spam

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:39:31 +0000

[...] dat Typhone op zijn minst op de hoogte is van de campagne, omdat de resultaten van de campagne gericht via Google Analytics worden [...]

By: Newbie

Newbie — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:30:43 +0000

Hi all,

I always thought Campaign Tracking is used when a company/an individual sends out emails relatively rarely as the links should be generated manually with the URL Builder and then added to the links in the email manually. Is this right?

What about regular newsletters? What if a website sends out daily around 10 different emails to more than half a million subscribers? The content/links in those emails is generated automatically based on the content published on the site in the past 24 hrs. Is it possible to use campaign tagging in an automated way so that every link in a new email gets tagged automatically (e.g. medium, campaign name, links position in the mail and month) before the email gets sent out?

Thanks a lot!

By: Justin Cutroni

Justin Cutroni — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 02:31:46 +0000

@vangelis – Google is indexing that URL because it’s a completely valid URL. You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to define a canonical URL and remove the duplicate with the utm_ parameters.

By: vangelis

vangelis — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 21:45:27 +0000

Hi, i am facing the strange problem that a link tag url, that i have added in an swf is indexed in google!! how is this possible? the link url is sth like http://www.sitename.com/?utm=etc... is this happen because the string query goes without a .php or html? thank you for in advance

By: Justin Cutroni

Justin Cutroni — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:05:02 +0000

Hi Bill,

Unfortunately no. The GA JS will not have fired in time. You need to make sure that the utm parameters are in the URL when the visitor lands on the site. However, if I remember correctly, you can create a 301 that let’s the query parameters persist. But double check me on that, I’m no SEO expert.

Justin

By: Bill Addison

Bill Addison — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 14:43:56 +0000

Thanks for the clear explanation Justin. One question:

Is it safe to put a 301 redirect on this:
http://www.cutroni.com/landing_page.php?utm_campaign=fall-sale&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=boston.com

to this:
http://www.cutroni.com/landing_page.php

Would the campaign tracking still be caught before the 301 redirect? This would be a great way of getting the initiating the campaign tracking, and then forwarding the user to the unmodified URL. Would like to know your thoughts. Thanks!

By: Lincoln

Lincoln — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:25:34 +0000

I had a question about campaign tracking codes. You are only suppose to place these on links that arrive on your site from third party content (emails, banners, social sites, etc). Correct me if I’m wrong, but you should NOT be placing these on links within your site. For example, if you have a promo tile on your site you don’t want to track that cross-link on your internal site with a campaign code, correct?

By: دردشة

دردشة — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 21:59:33 +0000

[...] (For an alternative description, see Google Analytics Campaign Tracking Pt. 1: Link Tagging.) [...]

By: منتديات

منتديات — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:28:16 +0000

@Mike: It could be that some of the banners are not tagged with the link tagging parameters. Use the referring sites report to identify which pages on the referring domain have links back to your site. It could also be that, for some reason, the links are getting stripped off. And finally, is it possible that there are other, non-banner, links on the referring site?