Annielytics.com

I make data sexy

  • About
  • Resources
  • Services
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Log In

The Definitive Guide To Campaign Tagging in Google Analytics

campaign-tagging

UPDATE: Due to the general confusion over channel groupings, I wrote a comprehensive companion guide on what they are, why they’re important, how to modify them, and how to make sure your campaigns aren’t under-reporting. You’ll see how even large publishers like BuzzFeed, Gawker, and Jezebel are shooting themselves in the foot with bad tagging (and hence bad channels). I also wrote a post that serves as practical walkthrough demonstrating how to customize channels with more details on why the default channels are woefully inadequate for most sites and need to be customized.

I can say without hyperbole that no functionality in Google Analytics is misunderstood as much as campaign tagging. I’m a huge proponent of it because it enables marketers to track the effectiveness of all of their marketing efforts.

I’m writing this guide because if marketers understood the power of campaign tagging — and the level of granularity they could achieve when done well — there would be fewer spaghetti stains on their walls. In my experience, most companies either under-utilize, mangle, or overlook campaign tagging altogether.

And I can honestly say that in my years of consulting and performing analytics audits I have not seen one client even come close to using campaign tagging effectively. And some have even trashed their analytics data with it.

So my goal with this guide is to hopefully set that aright.

Table of Contents

How Campaign Tagging Works
Why Tag
Cast Of Characters
Video Explanation Of Campaign Tagging
Reports Impacted By Campaign Tags
Google’s Classification Rules
Fixing Default Channel Grouping
Developing A Tagging Strategy
Golden Rule Of Campaign Tagging
Social Tools Culprits
Excel Fix
Worst Tagging Mistakes I See
Tagging Resources

UPDATE: I added a great tip in the Cast Of Characters section submitted by a commenter.

How Campaign Tagging Works

When a visitor comes to a site that has the Google Analytics tracking code installed, Google Analytics captures a lot of data via cookies: the medium (organic, referral, direct, etc.), source (site the visitor came from), browser, screen resolution, country, metro, etc. etc. With campaign tagging you can overwrite the cookie data with your own custom tags.

Dramatic aside: Did you catch the enormity of that? Think of campaign tagging like fireworks: Powerful, beautiful, awe inspiring. Yet, if not treated with caution, you can blow your hand up.

fireworks

Okay, enough pyrotechnics. Let’s talk how to set them up.

You set up campaigns using query parameters that you add to links you include in marketing campaigns. You don’t have to set up anything in Google Analytics. When traffic comes to your site via these links, the data will automatically be added to the right reports.

These campaign parameters all start with utm_ and create key/value pairs in a URL**. For example, the URL https://www.annielytics.com/blog/excel-tips/ might look like https://www.annielytics.com/blog/excel-tips/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=functionfriday.

** If you already have query parameters you’re using for campaigns, you can switch out Google Analytics utm_ parameters with yours. Learn more from this resource on the Google site.

Back to Top

Why Tag

There are a number of reasons you want to tag your links, as well as a number of reports that are impacted by campaign tagging. (Learn more in the Reports Impacted By Campaign Tags section of the guide.) But here are a few top reasons:

  1. Campaign tagging consolidates all campaign data in a set of campaign reports (found under Acquisition > Campaigns).
  2. If you’re running paid search campaigns outside of AdWords (or AdWords campaigns with auto tagging disabled), those visits will show up as organic. (I’ve seen this happen. It’s ugly.)
  3. If you’re running campaigns on other non-search or social sites (like banner ads on affiliate sites) and you don’t tag those links, they’ll get lumped in with your referral traffic.
  4. If you’re running email campaigns, campaign tagging rises from really good idea to critical. This is because traffic from email will be grossly under-reported if you don’t tag all links pointing back to your site. There are three primary causes for this:
  • Visits from desktop apps, such as Outlook and Mac Mail, show up in analytics as direct — or medium = (none) — because no referer data gets passed.
  • Visits from webmail providers that default to a secure server (such as Gmail and Hotmail) don’t pass referer data.
  • Visits from mobile often show up as direct because of issues with referer data getting passed.

The bottom line is when you’re brokering traffic in some way, you want to make sure you can track the success of those campaigns.

Back to Top

Cast Of Characters

MVP Parameters

Google Analytics campaign tagging players

The tags you’ll be working with most are utm_medium, utm_source, and utm_campaign. Let’s give them a proper introduction, shall we?

Medium

campaign tracking Google Analytics medium bucket

Think of the medium parameter as a bucket. You want mediums to be nice, big buckets. The mediums that Google Analytics automatically identifies are organic, (none), referral, and cpc (if you’re using AdWords and are auto tagging links). When tagging your links, you should follow the same form for your custom mediums.

The reason you want these buckets to be big is it allows you to slice and dice your data by source and campaign name when all that luscious data comes in. If these buckets are too small, that segmentation becomes arduous at best, impossible at worst. It’s first-degree data abuse.

Although this list isn’t exhaustive and your campaigns may warrant mediums that aren’t included, here are some good mediums I’ve used over the years:

  • social
  • email
  • feed
  • banner
  • cpc
  • display
  • affiliate
  • ebook
  • tv
  • print
  • billboard
  • partner
  • radio
  • qr code
  • widget

The most common mistake I see with campaign tagging is confusing medium with source and less frequently campaign name. Of the three players, this one is the most important to get right, in my opinion. But if you get social and email wrong, other reports will suffer from this mistake. We’ll get to that more in the Reports Impacted By Campaign Tags of the guide.

Source

The source is simply where the link lives. For the best guide, let’s look at how Google Analytics lists sources.

referal format in Google Analytics

Note: t.co is Twitter’s link wrapper. When you share a link on Twitter that’s greater than 19 characters — even if you use a tool like TweetDeck or Hootsuite — it shows up in Google Analytics as coming from t.co. You can learn more from the Twitter site.

Before Twitter started using t.co, links from desktop and mobile apps were showing up in analytics as direct traffic if they weren’t tagged, so it’s definitely a welcome change.

Did you publish a link on Twitter? If so, set utm_source to twitter.com. Did you publish it on Facebook? Then set it to facebook.com. Did you broker a banner on my site (suspending reality for a moment)? Then set it to annielytics.com. Pretty straightforward.

One exception email. Since emails don’t actually live on a site, you have to get a little resourceful. If you’re using an email service, like Marketo, you could set utm_source to marketo. I’ve also seen sites set source to internal. What you don’t want to do is set it to your domain. I’ve seen clients do this. The problem is these visits will look like self-referrals (or visits sent from your own site), and these should be avoided.

Campaign Name

Campaign Name is simply the name of your campaign. Seems easy enough. And yet this is a tag that sites botch pretty consistently. Strategic, well-organized marketing campaigns should have campaign names that span multiple mediums and sources. Competition is healthy, as is testing, which you will be hard pressed to do if you don’t test your campaigns in different mediums.

Okay, it’s story time. Once upon a time, I worked in-house with a publishing company, and we had two campaigns that we were pushing pretty hard. One was a membership campaign we’ll call 25cents (the idea being the cost of membership broken down by day). We also had a half off sale for students that we’ll call half+off. (A plus sign translates to spaces in Google Analytics reports.)

We ran these campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, email, four different sites owned by the company, and several partner sites. So these campaigns were divided into four mediums: social, email, partner, and banner. (We could have used display in lieu of banner, but we wanted to differentiate them from AdWords display ads. It’s a judgment call. And if these partners had been affiliates, we would have used affiliate. But they weren’t.)

When the data started coming in, we were able to compare the performance of these two campaigns across different mediums and sources. We also compared landing page performance on the different networks. Throw all that data in a pivot table (you can learn how with this video tutorial), and you can analyze it from many different angles to find opportunities and problem children.

As straightforward as naming campaigns may appear to be, here are the biggest mistakes I see with this parameter:

  • They’re too narrow. I tend to see this with companies that send out daily emails. What they tend to do is give each day a unique campaign name. And sometimes these emails follow different formats, depending on who creates the tags. This can make it very difficult (at least without some pretty sophisticated regex) to group all these visits, if you want to analyze the performance of your daily email. For daily emails, it would be better, in my opinion/experience, to use one campaign name (e.g., daily+deals+email). If you want more detail, you have two more campaign parameters we’ll get to in a minute. Now if you send out a monthly newsletter, I recommend incorporating the month and year in the campaign name because it’s part of the identification of the newsletter. For example, you could use 2014-03+member+newsletter.
  • They’re too cryptic. Sometimes developers use automatically generated campaign names, or paranoid marketers obfuscate them so their competitors won’t be able to figure out what campaigns they’re running. The problem is that oftentimes this scorched-earth approach to campaign naming results in marketers having no idea what these campaign names refer to. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. If it’s not feasible to rename these cryptic campaigns, set up a lookup table in Excel or your database to use for in reporting.
  • They’re too fragmented. As I’ve already mentioned, calling a campaign a unique name for each medium and source you publish to prohibits segmenting these campaigns later. The more you can compare campaign performance across different channels, the more refined your campaign strategy will become over time.
  • They follow naming conventions that should be reserved for medium and/or source. For example, if you have a new campaign you’re launching on Pinterest, there’s no need to include Pinterest in the campaign name. You’ll have it in the source.

B Team Parameters

Although Medium, Source, and Campaign are the parameters you’ll use most as a marketer (PPC campaigns excepted), there are a couple other optional parameters that are on call in the event you require their services.

campaign parameters in Google Analytics

Content

The Content parameter allows you to provide additional details about your campaign. For paid search campaigns, you use it to differentiate ads. But you can also use it for marketing campaigns. Here are a few examples of how you might use it in non-PPC campaigns:

  • To differentiate different types of links in emails, e.g., text vs image.
  • To differentiate links from different sections of your emails, e.g., header vs editorial vs sidebar vs footer, etc.
  • To record the date of daily emails.
  • To run A/B and multivariate tests. For example, you could put several links in an email to the same page but in different sections and/or formats. Similarly, if you have banner ads on different sites, you could use the content parameter to capture the banner size (e.g., utm_content=728×90) or position on the page (e.g., utm_content=right+sidebar).

Term

The Term parameter is used in paid search campaigns to note the keywords you’re bidding on (e.g., utm_term=high+top+sneakers). Again, with AdWords, if you have auto tagging enabled (which I strongly recommend), you don’t have to set this value. But if you’re running ads on Bing or any other paid search network, you need to tag these manually. Failure to do so will artificially inflate your organic search data.

UPDATE: My friend, Yehoshua Coren, who is brimming with awesome, added this great tip in a comment:

Here’s my preferred tag for Bing Ads –> turns GA into a matched search query performance marketing report.

?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=[“manually”-added-campaign-name]&utm_term={keyword}&utm_content={QueryString}

It pays to have smart friends! Thanks, Yehoshua!

You could repurpose this parameter for other marketing campaigns, but I don’t recommend it.

Back to Top

Video Explanation Of Campaign Tagging

Still confused? I created a video that attempts to explain campaign tagging visually. You know, just doing my part to accommodate different learning types. 🙂 Seriously, I just really want marketers to really absorb this. It’s that important, in my opinion.

Back to Top

Reports Impacted By Campaign Tags

Up until recently, if you messed campaign tagging up, it only polluted your campaign reports. Not so anymore. There are now a number of reports that are impacted by these tags, especially the medium parameter.

Campaign Reports

First and foremost, the Campaign reports in Google Analytics rise and fall on the integrity of a site’s campaign tagging efforts. To analyze campaign traffic, you’ll want to navigate to Acquisition > Campaigns. The default primary dimension is Campaign, but you can also choose Source, Medium, Landing Page, or any of the options in the drop-down menu.

Campaign report in Google Analytics
Click for larger image

I will frequently first click on the Medium primary dimension to make sure there’s no funny business going on in the data. For example, I recently audited a site that had more than 2,000 unique mediums. Most sites aren’t going to have more than 10 [legitimate] mediums, total.

You can also take advantage of the secondary dimension to analyze your mediums more closely. What I’ll typically do is isolate a single medium and then choose source or campaign as my secondary dimension to view all of the sources or campaigns in each medium, like so:

medium-source

Through the interface you can export a flat report that can be brought into a pivot table (learn how in this post). But you only get two dimensions**. If you’re planning to do your analysis online, you can create a custom report that includes Medium, Source, and Campaign with whatever metrics you want to analyze (e.g., visits, bounce rate, revenue, etc.). Then you get up to five dimensions.

If you’re unfamiliar with custom reports, you can learn how to create them in this video tutorial I did. Or you could use this custom report as a starter. Just click the Edit button in the top-left corner of the report to customize it to your needs. (If you get a 404 error, it’s because you need to log in to your Google Analytics account.)

custom report in Google Analytics

If you want a flat report that requires more than two dimensions**, such as one that includes medium, source, and campaign (my fave cocktail), you’ll need to use the API. I wrote this post on the Search Engine Land site that describes how to use a free analytics tool to do this. Here’s a screenshot demonstrating how you might want to set that up.

Excellent Analytics API how to

 

**UPDATE: Google Analytics now gives you up to five dimensions in custom reports!  (Post updated March 10, 2015)

Social Reports

If your social links are mis-tagged your reports under Acquisition > Social will be off. The issues vary slightly depending on the social report you’re working with. But the closer you tag your links to the formatting you see in Google Analytics’ referral reports, the more trustworthy your data will be.

What’s really sad is I’ve seen cases where it would have actually been better for clients to not tag at all than to tag incorrectly. I don’t promote eschewing campaign tagging, but mis-tagging social links is worse than not tagging them at all because, if left untagged, Google would have at least recognized the visits as having come from one of its 400 or so social networks. I had some larger clients who were significantly hurt by social tools like Buffer and SocialFlow mis-tagging social links as utm_medium=twitter or utm_medium=facebook. (You’ll learn more about this in the Social Tools Culprits of the guide.)

Multi-Channel Fnnnels Reports

Google Analytics’ new(ish) MCF reports are the best upgrade to Google Analytics in years. I explained why in my Taking Credit Where Credit’s Due presentation last year (starting in slide 78). They are amazing, and every site that reports any kind of revenue (whether ecommerce or goal values) should use them. If you don’t, I can tell you right now that you are not taking enough credit for your marketing efforts.

Seriously, check out slides 90 to 96 to see the uptick in reported revenue when assists were added in. I found for one client that for every $3 their PPC vendor was reporting in conversions, PPC accounted for $8 in assisted conversions. By adding MCF reporting to their monthly reports, I made their PPC vendor look like heroes, unbeknownst to them. And this was before Google upgraded the lookback window to 90 days instead of the initial 30 days we had.

Important Note: At the time of writing (3/31/14), the lookback window for the Multi-Channel Funnels API still only gives us 30 days. It hasn’t been upgraded to 90 days yet. 🙁 This is important because if you set the lookback window to 90 days in the interface, your data will not align with the data you get from the API.

These reports can’t be fixed by fixing the Default Channel Grouping inside of Google Analytics, unfortunately. This includes the Attribution models under Conversions > Attribution. You have to use custom channel groupings to apply customized channels to these reports. But at the time of writing custom channel groupings aren’t available in the API. Unless you’re using an API tool like Tableau or Analytics Canvas that allows you to clean up your data, your only option is to fix your reports by fixing your tags or inside Excel, as I demonstrate in the Excel Fix section of the guide.

To learn more about MCF reports, check out Google’s resource on it. My friend, Yehoshua Coren, also wrote a great post on Multi-Channel Funnels.

Back to Top

Google’s Classification Rules

If you want to see the rules Google uses to classify visits, there’s a backdoor in. Follow these steps:

  1. Go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions.
  2. Under Primary Dimension, click Channel Groupings, and choose Copy MCF Channel Grouping Template from the drop-down. (We’re not actually going to copy them.
  3. In the Channel Grouping Settings dialog, click on any of the pencil icons to edit a definition.
  4. To check out Google’s definition of Social Network, click the pencil icon. Here’s what you’ll see:
Multi-Channel Funnels settings
Click for larger image

Here’s the regex Google uses to help classify social traffic:

^(social|social-network|social-media|sm|social network|social media)$

So this dialog says, in plain English, if the visit comes from one of the 400 sites Google has classified as a social network OR medium is set to social, social-network, social-media, sm, social+network, or social+media.

If you do paid search, you should definitely check out the channel definitions for Paid Search, Display, and Other Advertising. For example, I was surprised to find out that text-based display ads don’t fall under the category of Display; they fall under Other Advertising.

Google has also published these definitions here.

Back to Top

Fixing Your Default Channel Grouping

UPDATE: Make sure you read my comprehensive companion guide channel groupings before you touch these settings.

To modify your Default Channel Grouping, navigate to Admin > View > Channel Grouping. Under Default Channel Grouping, click Actions and then Edit from the drop-down menu.

Default Channel Grouping settings
Click for larger image

Then click OR and set Medium to regex match twitter|facebook (or whatever other definitions you need to include). Just put a pipe character in between each definition. It means “or” in regex. (Learn how to master regex in Google Analytics in this post I wrote for non-developers.)

Back to Top

Walking Through A Tagging Strategy

As I mentioned earlier, you want to create your strategy so that you have campaigns that span different mediums and sources. No better way to explain how to craft a tagging strategy than to walk through one. So let’s create two faux campaigns and plan out their strategy.

Business: Software provider of a beta social media analytics tool

Objective: Introduce the tool to the market. Incentivize people to try it with a 30-day free trial. Reach out to leaders in the social media space and marketing professors to offer a one-year free trial.

Campaign 1

Campaign Name: Free Trial

Target Channels: Twitter, Facebook ads, sponsored tweets, brochures**, and banner ads on SocialMediaExaminer.com and SocialMediaToday.com

Landing Page: http://www.cooltool.com/free-trial/

** Tracking links in print material or billboards is best done with a vanity URL. The strategy is to buy a domain with a catchy name, like coolesttoolever.com and create a permanent (301) redirect to your tagged landing page. So if we’re putting the vanity URL in a brochure that’s distribute at a conference like South by Southwest (SXSW), we might redirect it to a page like this: http://www.cooltool.com/free-trial/?utm_medium=print&utm_source=conference+brochure&utm_campaign=free+

trial&utm_content=sxsw.

Campaign 2

Campaign Name: Leader Outreach

Target Channels: email, outreach via leaders’ site contact pages, brochures to colleges, LinkedIn ads, and a post on the Marketing, Advertising, and Communications Professors LinkedIn group.

Landing Page: http://www.cooltool.com/leaders/

Strategy Doc

Embedded below is a Google Spreadsheet with a potential tagging strategy for the campaigns above.

You can view this spreadsheet in its entirety here. If you’re logged in to Google, you can also save a copy for yourself by choosing File > Make a copy.

Back to Top

Golden Rule Of Campaign Tagging

Let me ask you this: Would you paint your neighbor’s house? Probably not. Or would you reach over to a stranger’s table at a restaurant and just take a handful of his french fries? If so, I want to go out for burgers with you at the next conference I’ll be attending. But for most of us, the answer to that silly question is [hopefully] no.

But tagging links to someone else’s site isn’t much different. Why? Because they’re not looking for traffic from your site in their Campaigns reports; they’re looking for it in their All Referrals report (under Acquisition). Also, when you tag links to someone else’s site they don’t get as much info about your site, such as what page the traffic came from. (You need to use a custom report that uses the Full Referrer dimension to get this. It’s not in any of the standard reports. You can use this custom report as a template.)

Finding others’ campaigns in your campaign reports should be easy enough, if you use a strategy doc like the I shared in the previous section to keep track of all of your tagged links. Simply look for campaigns you don’t recognize. If you find some, you’ll need to either filter those out of your campaign reports or redefine them in your Default Channel Grouping (which was covered in the Fixing Default Channel Grouping section of the guide).

Back to Top

Social Tools Culprits

Some social tools, such as Buffer and SocialFlow, automatically tag links. I’m not talking about offering you link-tagging functionality like HootSuite and MailChimp that you can use to tag your links. We’re talking about tagging every link that’s shared using their tool on social media. This is suboptimal as it’s not traffic that was brokered by site owners. But the really bad news is that when they started automatically tagging all link shared with their tools they mis-tagged medium as the source instead of social.

For large publishers this mistake has caused considerable under-reporting in all of the reports listed in the Reports Impacted By Campaign Tags section of the guide.

I reached out to both tool providers and let them know about this error. To the Buffer team’s credit, they changed their tags to set utm_medium to social Jan 7 of this year. All of my tweets to the SocialFlow team went unanswered, and their tags are still set to utm_medium=socialflow, last I checked.

Here’s another example of what these genetically altered links look like:

http://jezebel.com/jailed-craigslist-killer-claims-responsibility-for-at-l-1523890277?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&

utm_medium=socialflow

bang-head-here

Let me know if you find examples of other tools mis-tagging social links in the comments below.

Back to Top

Excel Fix

If you have mis-tagged campaigns, you can use a fairly simple nested IF statement to rename your tags in Excel. The IF formula might look something like this:

campaign tagging fix in Excel

I created the report using this custom report that pulls in just the medium and source dimensions. You can also download the Excel file here.

Back to Top

Worst Tagging Mistakes I See

Although most of these mistakes have been covered elsewhere, I’m going to compile them into one place.

  1. The worst campaign tagging mistake a site can make, hands down, is tagging internal links. Imagine a scenario like this (which is based on a true story): You put campaign tags on all of your navigation links, as well as your sidebar links. You set them to values like utm_medium=navigation and utm_source=topnav. Then let’s say someone comes to your site from an AdWords ad and clicked on a link to one of your category pages from the top navigation bar. That visitor is no longer from medium/source = cpc/google; s/he is from medium/source = navigation/topnav. Imagine that happening to more than a million visits in a month. This is exactly what happened to one client, and they had to declare data bankruptcy on their Google Analytics account and start over. You can read more about it in this post. You want to use events for internal links and campaign tagging for external links. You can learn more about event tracking from this resource from Google.
  2. Not making the medium “bucket” big enough — or tagging medium as sources like twitter or facebook.
  3. Mixing cases in campaign tags. The Google Spreadsheet I share to help people with campaign tagging forces all tags to lowercase to prevent this from happening. If you are using proper case and want to continue to do so, you just need to be careful to make sure you’re consistent.
  4. Missing links in boilerplate sections of your emails, such as the header and footer.
  5. Creating unique campaign names for each medium and source. You want your campaign names to span multiple mediums if you’re using more than one marketing channels for your campaigns.
  6. Making campaign names too cryptic. Sometimes developers device ways to create automated campaign names. This is not ideal. If no one knows what the campaign was for, it’s impossible to measure its effectiveness.
  7. Tagging editorial links. So let’s say you use guest blogging as a marketing strategy. I’ve seen sites add campaign tags in their link(s) that point back to their site. In my opinion, I think this is a mistake. These links should show up in your referral reports, not your campaign reports. As I mentioned earlier in the guide, you get more data from referrals than you do campaigns.
  8. Cramming too much into the campaign name. There’s no reason to include source or medium in the campaign name, e.g., facebook+ad+concert+mar+2014. In this example, facebook should go in the utm_source parameter, and ad should be taken out and utm_medium tagged as cpc or ppc.
  9. Making parameter values difficult to read in campaign reports. I see campaign names like marchmembernewsletter all the time. Remember that you can use the plus sign to generate spaces in campaign reports.
  10. Mis-tagging Google+ links. If you’re ever in doubt how you should tag a source, just pull up the All Referrals report to see how they show up there. For Google+ most visits show up as plus.url.google.com, though some show up as coming from plus.google.com.
  11. Tagging links to someone else’s site. Remember: just tag links to your site.
  12. Not following a consistent naming convention for campaigns. For example, if you have a monthly newsletter and you want to capture the month and year in the campaign name, use the same format each time. I like to follow the format of yyyy-mm before the campaign name (e.g., 201403). This aids sorting in Google Analytics and Excel. Also, following a consistent format makes it easier to group campaigns for analysis.

Back to Top

Tagging Resources

My Auto-Tagging Google Doc

To aid you with your tagging efforts, you can use Google’s tagging tool or the Google Spreadsheet I’ve created.

Google’s Resource

And here is the link to Google’s resource on campaign tagging.

Wistia’s Cool Fresh URL Tool

Let’s face it. Tagged URLs are ugly. It’s the one thing I really don’t like about them. They also get shared by people like me cross-channel because it’s too much work to remove the parameters to share a clean URL. That’s why Wistia released a free script that cleans URLs after the browser has had a chance to grab the campaign data. I haven’t actually tested it, but you can learn more here.

Back to Top

Questions?

If you have any questions, I want to know them. I may even use them to update this guide. You can leave your question in the comments or reach out to me on Twitter. Also, please report any tools you see mis-tagging links. If there are enough, it may warrant an open letter to those providers.

Learn more

You can learn more about campaign tagging in my Analtyics Audit Template, a self-guided, 147-page audit template that is regularly updated and will teach you how to do detailed analytics audits like a pro for $295.

buy-now-button

Comments

  1. AndyBeard says

    March 31, 2014 at 2:37 PM

    Hi Annie

    Maybe you could try to reach out to the Buffer guys again as my hints so far have been unsuccessful. They have lots of ping ponging of traffic between blog, main site and internal links on main site using utm_campaign and sometimes medium as well.
    I often feel their great open reports on how they are growing their business are slightly flawed due to bad data, and maybe different data would allow them to build a better hypothesis.
    I am sure they would gain a lot of benefit from MCF reports.

    I disagree on guest blogging tags.

    If you still do guest blogging it should be for the traffic and measuring the ROI accurately is important.

    Traffic from a guest post might come from the site, but it is just as likely to come from an RSS reader or email.
    As an example if you get a link from Search Engine Land’s “Search Cap” a ton of the traffic comes from email and other sources. Sure you see actually see the redirects from 3rd Door Media, but that isn’t the case with other RSS to Email solutions, or the redirects are very generic and can’t be attributed to a particular publication.
    Not being able to see 50% of your traffic attributed to a particular guest blog post is a bit like not attributing ad spend.

    It is even more important with the growing use of “native advertising” – guest posting could and maybe should be looked on as native advertising which you don’t have to pay for, but still costs you time.

    Another huge issue is not knowing if someone is a new signup compared to a login. Often you can only tell that after the login has happened because of people using multiple devices, by testing whether a previous login time is stored for the account holder.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 31, 2014 at 5:38 PM

      Hi Andy,

      I couldn’t follow most of your comments. Sorry. But we’ll just have to agree to disagree on tagging guest posts.

      As for Buffer, are you saying that they’re tagging their own internal links? If so, do you have examples of this?

      Thanks for stopping by!

      Reply
      • AndyBeard says

        April 1, 2014 at 1:51 PM

        For buffer here are some examples

        From the banner in the sidebar of the main blog and open blog, a bit.ly link that then redirects to https://bufferapp.com/?utm_campaign=blog_side

        The sharebar at the top of the main blog http://bufferapp.com/?utm_campaign=sharebar1

        Footer link in blog posts via bit.ly to https://bufferapp.com/?utm_campaign=blog_bottom

        Homepage to their Buffer for business
        https://bufferapp.com/ to https://bufferapp.com/business?utm_campaign=landing_page

        Here is some fun wasted effort
        On https://bufferapp.com/business
        If you add a parameter
        https://bufferapp.com/business?utm_junk=123

        Whatever parameter gets added to the begin free trial link

        Jobs link near logo
        http://jobs.bufferapp.com/?utm_campaign=logo_hiring_link

        From the awesome page to the business page
        https://bufferapp.com/awesome

        https://bufferapp.com/business?utm_campaign=awesome

        When you are logged in, upgrading to awesome link
        https://bufferapp.com/awesome?utm_campaign=app_header&utm_medium=web

        On the guest blogging, I will include some more details in a followup blog post, but yeah, we will still probably disagree.

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          February 23, 2016 at 11:16 PM

          Andy, I came here to answer another comment and noticed I never replied to yours. I never saw it till today. If you even see this comment, thank you for taking the time to list these instances of campaign tagging on the Buffer site! I will definitely let them know!

          Reply
  2. Yehoshua Coren says

    March 31, 2014 at 2:57 PM

    Annie – I love your megaposts. Keep rockin’ 🙂

    Here’s my preferred tag for Bing Ads –> turns GA into a matched search query performance marketing report.

    ?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=[“manually”-added-campaign-name]&utm_term={keyword}&utm_content={QueryString}

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 31, 2014 at 5:45 PM

      Thanks, Yehoshua! I added this tip to the guide.

      Reply
    • Les Faber says

      April 1, 2014 at 10:50 AM

      Nice one Yehoshua. Wouldn’t expect anything less from you.

      Reply
    • chen says

      April 1, 2014 at 1:39 PM

      When I tried to use Google URL builder, the “utm_term={keyword}” is encoded to “utm_term=%7Bkeyword%7D”. In the case of using Bing Ads, should the left and right parenthesis remain at its decoded form of { and }, and not the encoded form of %7B and %7D?

      Thanks.

      Reply
      • Yehoshua Coren says

        April 1, 2014 at 2:34 PM

        @disqus_MestERNDXp:disqus non-encoded. Don’t use the URL Builder, build out your tags using the spreadsheet that Annie links to above.

        Reply
        • Chen says

          April 2, 2014 at 12:04 PM

          @yehoshuacoren:disqus, Thanks!

          Reply
  3. notonmyface says

    March 31, 2014 at 3:55 PM

    It seems that GA has switched away from using the plus-sign (+) for spaces and is now using %20s.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 31, 2014 at 5:46 PM

      No. Plus signs just get encoded as %20s, which then translate into spaces.

      Reply
      • Leigh says

        November 24, 2014 at 6:05 AM

        Annie, I’ve noticed in the last few tracking ulrs I’ve set, the traffic from those links was not showing up in analytics. I use the + sign in all campaign names. I normally build links manually (copy and paste from old tracking urls) so I decided to see what the official Google url builder does to the + sign, and yes, it converts it to %2. I set up a new tracking url the other day using the %2 instead of using a + sign, and it worked. So, I think something must have changed i.e. it appears that you now have to directly use the encoding and not the + sign. Maybe they’ve stopped converting the + sign for some reason, which is a bit of a pain.

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          November 28, 2014 at 8:25 PM

          + signs are always encoded in URLs as %20. But you don’t have to enter %20. That will happen automatically. I only use + signs and haven’t ever had issues with it.

          Reply
          • Tim Van Buren says

            November 2, 2015 at 9:24 PM

            + signs are URL encoded as %2B
            see: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

            Does analytics do some kind of error correction wherein they end up as a space in reports?

            Great article, by the way. I read it top to bottom. You made things much clearer, and corrected some misconceptions I got from other similar blog posts and spreadsheets.

            One thing I am puzzled about is the situation with Facebook ads. You can buy a cpc banner ad, a cpm ad, or promote a post. I am trying to puzzle out how I would tag those three different situations. What do you think?

          • Annie Cushing says

            November 2, 2015 at 11:27 PM

            It’s not error correction. Google just decodes the encoded URL.

            Re: Facebook ads, I would use the mediums Google provides whenever possible. But for promoted posts, I’d use ‘utm_medium=promoted+post’ and add ‘promoted post’ to the channel definition in the channel of your choosing. Some use Paid Search (although technically paid social isn’t search), Other Advertising, or a custom channel altogether, like Paid Social. It just all depends on how you want to slice and dice your data to get the most insight.

  4. ronellsmith says

    March 31, 2014 at 4:45 PM

    Annie, Annie, Annie… That is all I have to say 🙂

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 31, 2014 at 5:46 PM

      That’s all you have to say. 🙂

      Reply
  5. Ayelet Golz says

    March 31, 2014 at 6:36 PM

    Thanks Annie! I love campaign tagging, but can see ways to use it better now.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 31, 2014 at 6:57 PM

      Happy to hear that, Ayelet!

      Reply
  6. joshgates says

    March 31, 2014 at 7:49 PM

    seriously the BEST guide…possibly ever…on this misunderstood topic! Bravo!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 31, 2014 at 10:14 PM

      Thanks! I’ve been wanting to write it for a long time.

      Reply
  7. vniven says

    March 31, 2014 at 9:00 PM

    I’m too old to say this, but, OMG – this is exactly the guide we needed, today.

    Thank you!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 31, 2014 at 10:15 PM

      #kismet 🙂

      Reply
  8. Myke Larson says

    April 1, 2014 at 2:04 AM

    Thank you for lifting some of the fog that is tagging. Great examples and visualizations mixed with well written instruction and reasoning. Starting at the top again.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 1, 2014 at 10:25 AM

      Haha! See? You’re getting it already!

      Reply
  9. stevenlopresti says

    April 1, 2014 at 5:33 AM

    What a great post – I thought I knew everything there was to know about campaign tagging, but obviously not. Thanks for sharing it!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 1, 2014 at 10:26 AM

      You’re welcome!

      Reply
  10. Adrian Bold says

    April 1, 2014 at 8:06 AM

    Thank you for making this information available, Annie. It’s certainly one I’ve bookmarked plus saved to Evernote and will be sure to refer back to often.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 1, 2014 at 10:26 AM

      I live and die by Evernote!

      Reply
      • Adrian Bold says

        April 1, 2014 at 11:47 AM

        Now, that is serious! 😉

        Reply
  11. Hashim Warren says

    April 1, 2014 at 8:42 AM

    Thank you for your generosity, Annie. I first discovered your work by watching your talk at MozCon. And I saw this article through Inbound.

    Now I’m sharing it as far and wide that I can!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 1, 2014 at 10:26 AM

      Excellent Hashim! I hope to meet you at this year’s MozCon!

      Reply
  12. Iulia T says

    April 1, 2014 at 10:12 AM

    Really great article! However, i have a problem (i think?) in my custom reports. I get a lot of (not set)s and i don’t know whether i should be alarmed and think something’s wrong (we use some redirect urls that i read might affect how results show up in Analytics) or if i should be happy that SEO paid off. How can i tell?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 1, 2014 at 10:27 AM

      What are you seeing as (not set)? You can send screenshots to annie(at)annielytics.com, if you want me to take a look.

      Reply
  13. Les Faber says

    April 1, 2014 at 10:49 AM

    Great work Annie. You really piqued my interest on that Buffer / SocialFlow comment. So I decided to do a mini experiment as I really don’t like the fact that they automatically shorten URLs. I created a simple URL with Google’s Campaign tagging tool. So far so good. Then I took that URL and popped it in a test Buffer Account. As expected the URL gets shortened. What I didn’t expect is that Buffer overwrote my Campaign name (utm_campaign=WebFuel%2BPromo) with theirs: “&utm_campaign=buffer”. So, in essence, Buffer is useless if you want to get (really) serious about tracking Campaigns properly. Not cool.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 1, 2014 at 8:19 PM

      I really wish they would stop doing that. I chock it up to a general lack of understanding about campaign tagging. I was jut really glad they changed the medium parameter to social.

      Reply
      • Les Faber says

        April 2, 2014 at 6:59 AM

        I agree Annie. That being said, this puts them a few steps behind their competitors. I’ll prod them a bit They have been very responsive in the past. I’ll report back via this thread.

        Reply
  14. Benjamin Beck says

    April 1, 2014 at 11:38 AM

    Annie you are the Best! Huge Thank You!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 1, 2014 at 8:17 PM

      Always a pleasure, Ben! 🙂

      Reply
  15. Benjamin Hoffman says

    April 1, 2014 at 5:27 PM

    For those doing paid advertising, I highly suggest look into tagging more than just the standard tags. There are so many options:

    Bing Query String creator: http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/help-topic/how-to/50838/how-to-use-query-string-parameters

    Google ValueTrack: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375447?hl=en

    Both of these solutions allow you to define and add so many parameters.

    Although many of the tags might not make it into your Google Analytics account, you can still collect the data on your sales funnel forms or lead gen forms.

    Also, for an awesome URL tag builder, take a look at this template from their gallery: https://drive.google.com/previewtemplate?id=0Agl8lwsP-cNVdDJDa0s1cnNmOFZDMUFYa0kyN0RNaWc&mode=public&pli=1#

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 1, 2014 at 8:17 PM

      Thanks, Benjamin!

      Reply
  16. Torcsington says

    April 1, 2014 at 8:52 PM

    Hi there Annie, thanks for a terrific article.

    One quick question – for source, I use ‘facebook’ and ‘twitter’; not ‘facebook.com’ and ‘twitter.com’ as suggested. From there, I’d usually go to the ‘Network Referrals’ report in the Social section of GA and apply a secondary dimension of ‘Campaign’ to see the proportion of referral from Campaigns as opposed to just organic social referral.

    Is there any particular downside to not appending ‘.com’ to the ends of the source?

    Many thanks!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2014 at 8:11 PM

      I personally like to model my sources after how Google Analytics records sources. Referrals include the TLDs in the sources and visits from search (paid and organic) don’t.

      Reply
  17. Melissa Hawkins says

    April 2, 2014 at 5:04 AM

    Hi Annie, great article and thanks for the spreadsheet that you created! Is there a way that I could build an automatic link-shortening tool into the spreadsheet? I have seen it done before, but I’m not sure how to do it in myself. Thanks, Melissa

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2014 at 11:08 PM

      Hi Melissa, it’s totally possible. I can’t do the formula right now. I’m out of town, but if you email me at annie(at)annielytics.com and remind me, I’ll add it to the workbook.

      Reply
  18. Antoine says

    April 2, 2014 at 6:31 AM

    Many thanks @anniecushing:disqus . Just been using your excel tool for managing our Campaign ! + Custom GA dashboard is really appreciated !

    So if i understand correctly, you’ll create a different URL for each single post you made on social networks ? How do you distinguish between trafic from curating on social network to sharing your own content ?

    Thanks again !

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2014 at 10:57 PM

      You’re welcome, Antoine! As for your question, traffic from social media that comes to your site organically (IOW, not as a result of a tagged link you’ve shared) is going to show up in your All Referrals report, not your Campaigns report. But you’ll see them all together (if you’ve tagged utm_medium as social) in your social reports because Google defines social as any visit that comes from the social medium OR from one of the ~400 sites Google has classified as a social network.

      Reply
  19. Rumble Romagnoli says

    April 2, 2014 at 6:31 PM

    Awesome

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2014 at 10:46 PM

      Thanks!

      Reply
  20. 91 Digital says

    April 2, 2014 at 9:05 PM

    Seriously awesome stuff: I thought I was pretty good, but of course you take it to the next level, Annie.

    Also was shocked to learn how many large companies are screwing this up:

    http://91digital.net/blog/saas-company-screwing-analytics

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2014 at 10:54 PM

      What page was the tagged URL on?

      Reply
      • Conrad O'Connell says

        April 4, 2014 at 12:24 PM

        Hey Annie,

        (Author of post here)

        it’s on their blog at http://blog.crazyegg.com & also on their home page when you get hit with the pop-up. I sent a couple tweets their way but doesn’t look like they care to look at it. Their loss, am I right? 😉

        Reply
  21. Tom Bowen says

    April 4, 2014 at 7:58 PM

    I’ve seen really good stuff from you in the past Annie, but this is one of the most comprehensive, yet simplest to understand pieces of work on any GA topic I’ve seen. Terrific work!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 5, 2014 at 9:02 AM

      Thanks, Tom! Glad you like it!

      Reply
  22. Ayelet Golz says

    April 7, 2014 at 6:10 PM

    Annie – if I tag a blog post so I can track traffic that comes to that blog post from another blog post on the same site, is that okay? Would this fall under the “tagging editorial links” mistake above?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 7, 2014 at 9:11 PM

      Hi Ayelet,

      I know there’s quite a bit of confusion on this topic. But, for one, you don’t tag posts to see what traffic is coming to that post. You tag a link to a post you want to track. Big difference. But, even so, you don’t ever want to use campaign tagging on internal links. If you want to see the traffic from one blog post to another, you can use the Navigation Summary – a tab on the All Pages report.

      Reply
      • Ayelet Golz says

        April 8, 2014 at 8:54 AM

        Sure, that makes sense. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. Sometimes GA feels like a maze.

        Reply
  23. Heather Physioc says

    April 7, 2014 at 6:14 PM

    The best, clearest, most user-friendly explanation of UTM parameter tagging on the web, hands down. I shared this with all my clients and colleagues immediately. You said it so much better than I ever could. With the increased focus on attribution modeling and multi-channel funnels reporting to our clients at our agency, it’s more critical than ever that we get the team consistent. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 7, 2014 at 9:12 PM

      Thanks, Heather! I’m glad it resonated with you. That was definitely my goal. 🙂

      Reply
  24. AG says

    April 11, 2014 at 11:01 AM

    Thanks Annie, I do have a question based on your example. I see you have, for print, 3 different campaign content (princeton, cornell and stanford). The URL is the same.
    Correct me if I’m wrong but we would need three different vanity URLs on the Printed material in order to track that properly?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 11, 2014 at 2:25 PM

      You wouldn’t need three different vanity URLs. All you’d need to do is update the source for each.

      Reply
      • Garfield_Disliker says

        May 2, 2014 at 4:27 PM

        Annie, I have the same question as AG above… your answer confuses me a bit.

        So, for example, you have three brochures printed out, they respectively go to three colleges (princeton, cornell, stanford), and each of the brochures features the same vanity URL.

        I get you can track them separately with different campaign tagging parameters, but…

        If you don’t have three different vanity URLs in print, how are you redirecting the same URL to three different destination URLs (presumably the same landing page)? That seems challenging considering those would be direct/typed in URLs from a print source.

        You might not need three different vanity domains or anything, but if you’re trying to differentiate between each brochure/college it seems like you would definitely have to use a distinct URL in each brochure—vanity.com/princeton, vanity.com/cornell, etc.

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          May 6, 2014 at 10:49 AM

          Very good point. I clearly put inadequate thought into my response. You would need a vanity URL for each university.

          Reply
  25. Dan Shure says

    April 16, 2014 at 6:48 PM

    Annie – this is GOLD, thank you! I have a question I hope to be writing a post about in the context of Instagram not getting enough credit. Would you campaign tag links from your Instagram profile? Because on a mobile device (iPhone specifically), when you go to open a profile link it asks “do you want to open this in Safari?” and then it shows up as DIRECT traffic, not a referral of any sort. Thoughts on this?

    To add a little more context – I have a medium size eCommerce client in the Diamond Ring space. They’ve accumulated 18k followers in the last 3 months – which has amounted to about 100 visits a day from the Instagram profile, yet its coming in as direct traffic – when I segment direct traffic for tablet/mobile – that’s where the spike in traffic shows up at the same time they started using Instagram.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 16, 2014 at 11:22 PM

      Thanks, Dan! Glad you found it valuable!

      Re your question: How did you discover that no referer data was passed when you opened the link in Safari? My advice would be to try adding campaign tags to the link. Some sites strip them off. Please let me know if it works!

      Reply
      • Dan Shure says

        April 23, 2014 at 11:36 AM

        Thanks Annie 🙂 Ended up writing a post and referencing your article: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2014/04/23/instagram-traffic-attribution/ – I ended up using campaign tracking wrapped in a bitly link

        Reply
  26. Raymond Chau says

    April 16, 2014 at 9:51 PM

    Excellent post Annie!!!! After all these years using Google Analytics I think I didn’t do the tagging right! Thanks for all the great tips!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 16, 2014 at 11:22 PM

      Thanks, Raymond! I’m delighted it helped!

      Reply
  27. Dominic Hurst says

    April 17, 2014 at 7:05 AM

    A must read. People get campaign tracking so wrong. Big problem over misuse is the fact anyone can do it. I suggest organisations draw up a protocol and a book of words used to ensure consistency. People using them on internal web pages is a personal bugbear of mine.

    Thanks Annie!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 17, 2014 at 8:39 AM

      I recommend using data validation in the Google Doc to enforce accepted tagging protocols. But yeah, establishing a tagging framework and protocol from it is really important.

      Reply
  28. Fred says

    May 10, 2014 at 5:29 PM

    Useful Post! I have a question: what will happen if you only use the campaign-tag for, let’s say, an facebook link? Will Analytics automatically recognise the source and medium?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      May 10, 2014 at 5:36 PM

      No, it won’t. You have to include those.

      Reply
      • Scott Bowen says

        November 10, 2014 at 2:35 PM

        I have a related question: If some person out there clicked on a clean, non-tagged link from my website on Facebook or Twitter, it would still be tracked in GA with the source and medium info, right?

        I’m new-ish to the GA game (especially campaign tracking), and this guide gave me a great foundation to start from– Thanks!

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          November 29, 2014 at 12:13 AM

          It will show up as medium = referral instead of medium = social. You want traffic that comes to your site from social channels to show up that way but track visits that result from your own social-sharing efforts to show up in your campaign reports b/c that traffic is the result of your efforts.

          Reply
          • Eric Potratz says

            January 10, 2018 at 4:54 PM

            It looks like these direct links from social media sites now come in as medium=Social

          • Annie Cushing says

            January 10, 2018 at 5:37 PM

            I see that in Real-Time reports but not the Acquisition reports.

            Screenshots
            client 1: https://www.screencast.com/t/9RdpIi1O9
            client 2: https://www.screencast.com/t/kyWaA6xD

  29. Arman Assadi says

    July 10, 2014 at 7:06 PM

    Wow, Annie. What an incredible resource! Thanks for putting this together. Just stumbled upon it randomly and glad I did.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      July 10, 2014 at 8:09 PM

      Thank you! Glad it helps!

      Reply
  30. Joe says

    August 12, 2014 at 1:28 PM

    Great article! A couple questions. When running an email campaign, does it make sense to link tag a stand alone video off a email? I tried doing this and the link doesn’t work. I’m wondering if it’s because the video isn’t a webpage and there is nothing to track beyond that point. Also, does it make sense to tag a PDF doc from our website on a email? There are links on the doc so in theory you could track traffic beyond the PDF doc. Thanks!

    Reply
  31. Yair Spolter says

    September 2, 2014 at 8:10 AM

    Hi Annie,
    Thanks so much for this masterpiece!

    I’d like to ask you a question:
    I’ve heard from some people that including tracking data on links posted on a FB fan page can hurt your FB reach (even if they are posted using a shortener like bit.ly). Have you ever heard of this theory and do you have any experience or data to prove/disprove it?

    Thanks again!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      September 2, 2014 at 7:00 PM

      Hi Yair,

      I’ve asked around about this, and no one I know has run into this. I guess if you wanted to test it, you could alternate between tagged and untagged links on Facebook and see if there’s a difference. It’s not the most scientific study though since there are other factors that go into determining what posts do well reach-wise.

      Reply
  32. vincent barr says

    September 11, 2014 at 1:18 PM

    Well done.

    I remember I was *shocked* when I learned that a tool as widely used as Buffer could butcher referrer information for so long.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      September 11, 2014 at 4:34 PM

      At least they fixed their mistakes. There are other social tools that haven’t.

      Reply
  33. Eddie says

    September 29, 2014 at 2:19 PM

    Thanks for the great article! I have a question: Should the Social : Network Referrals report include tagged links also? I have found it includes only some of them, which leads me to think, as you mentioned in this article, I am tagging my links incorrectly. Our company doesn’t use utm parameters; we use src for source, seg for medium and cmp for campaign. Also, we actually use medium for what utm uses for campaign and campaign for what utm uses for medium. My colleague who is more knowledgeable on the subject set this up for us, so I don’t know if what we are doing is wrong and affecting the Social : Network Referrals report. If you or someone else can shed light on this I would be most grateful.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      September 29, 2014 at 3:18 PM

      If you want to use custom campaign parameters, you need to updated your tracking code. You can learn more here: http://bit.ly/custom-campaigns. These extra lines of code tell Google Analytics what to look for in URLs.

      Reply
      • Eddie says

        September 30, 2014 at 3:21 PM

        Should the Social : Network Referrals report include tagged links also? As I said, the report includes some but not all links.

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          September 30, 2014 at 4:18 PM

          Yes, they do include tagged links. Google Analytics doesn’t know what to look for if you’re using non-utm parameters and aren’t specifying your custom UTM keys.

          Reply
          • Eddie says

            September 30, 2014 at 7:58 PM

            But I do believe we have specified our custom UTM keys. That’s why I’m confused as to why some of tagged links are showing while others aren’t.

          • Annie Cushing says

            October 1, 2014 at 2:39 PM

            Campaign traffic can be found in the Campaigns and All Traffic reports. It also gets included in some social reports, like Social Networks, if tagged correctly.

        • Annie Cushing says

          September 30, 2014 at 11:06 PM

          I can’t reply to your last comment for some reason, so I’ll reply here. I don’t see evidence of the custom tracking code on your homepage.

          Reply
          • Eddie says

            October 1, 2014 at 2:17 PM

            Hi Annie,

            I just spoke to the colleague who set all this up. Apparently we don’t use custom tags. We have just renamed the UTM tags (i.e. we still use utm tags). So if you can think of any other reason why only some of my tagged links (all posts from our page include tags) show up in the referral report, it would be great to hear them 🙂 Thanks!

        • Annie Cushing says

          October 1, 2014 at 2:25 PM

          I can tell from your example link that you are using custom parameters, so you need to either start using UTM parameters or add the code I showed you to your GATC.

          But campaign traffic won’t show up in referral reports anyway.

          Reply
          • Eddie says

            October 1, 2014 at 2:36 PM

            OK thanks for your help! I will be passing this info on now! Does it not include any tagged links (campaign traffic)? Or just our site’s tagged links?

  34. Eddie says

    September 29, 2014 at 2:20 PM

    Here is an example of a tagged link we may use:

    http://www.fakesite.com?cmp=social&src=fb&seg=14-09-29_SalePost-SMCO

    Reply
  35. Dan Shure says

    December 5, 2014 at 6:16 PM

    Hey Annie!

    Say we’re setting up tagging mainly for tracking organic social sharing of blog posts. Would you use a campaign like “blog” (to represent the overall blogging efforts) or would you tag with the individual post name? I am thinking the former but just curious if this purpose requires more than one campaign name. Thanks!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2015 at 10:35 PM

      Hey, Dan!

      It’s so good to hear from you! Sorry for the horrifically late response! I didn’t realize I wasn’t receiving comment alerts. :/

      But I use “blog” unless it’s a really big post. So for this guide I used the campaign name “campaign+tagging+guide” because it was such a significant post. But for most I would use either “blog” or the blog category. It really just depends how granular you want to get with the reporting.

      Reply
  36. Kasey says

    December 30, 2014 at 7:28 PM

    I am just barely realizing and utilizing the power of the UTM parameters and have been searching online for best practices. This article is “truly” the definitive guide and I learned a lot from it and implemented a lot of UTM’s in my marketing today.

    I do have a question though. We have been using Buffer for quite some time and I am curious if they fixed the problems that you discussed in this post. They now have an option to turn on/off the Google Analytics Campaign Tracking and when I look at the Analytics it seems to be doing a good job of breaking down Buffer as the campaign with Social as the medium and Twitter, Facebook, etc. as the Source.

    So my question is will I gain anything from adding my own UTM parameters for Buffer specifically, or does Buffer do what I need it to do now?

    Reply
    • Kasey says

      December 30, 2014 at 7:30 PM

      After writing my comment, I realized that one benefit to doing it on my own is in the naming of the Campaign with something unique vs. Buffer. Would you agree?

      Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2015 at 8:28 PM

      Sorry for the horrifically late response! I didn’t realize I wasn’t receiving comment alerts. :/

      But I’m so glad this guide could help you! Anything you post on social media, you should tag. You shouldn’t use Buffer’s tagging. You’ll still get Buffer traffic, but that should be from others finding your content and using Buffer to share it.

      Reply
  37. Kevin says

    January 2, 2015 at 3:46 PM

    Hi Annie, I wanted to say thank you for putting this post together. I learned more practical information about Google Analytics campaign tagging in 1 hour here than I learned in 6 hours of digging through Google’s documentation. Thanks mucho!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2015 at 8:23 PM

      Sorry for the horrifically late response! I didn’t realize I wasn’t receiving comment alerts. :/

      But that’s really great to hear! So glad my guide could help!

      Reply
  38. Nate says

    January 26, 2015 at 2:16 PM

    Hi Annie,

    Read your post on UTM tagging and found it incredibly helpful. As simple as it seems, for whatever reason Ive always had a hard time keeping consistent with UTM conventions across channels.

    Do you have a recommendation on how to approach UTMs when it comes to Facebook social posts vs Facebook paid or even a combo of the two when you are putting paid dollars towards promoting posts? Do you recommend putting all FB paid ads under the CPC or Paid Acq source or would you simply put all FB under the source of social?

    Thanks so much

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2015 at 7:56 PM

      Sorry for the horrifically late response! I didn’t realize I wasn’t receiving comment alerts. :/

      But non-paid social should always be tagged as social and paid should be tagged as paid. But double-check your default channel grouping settings to make sure they route to the bucket you want them in.

      Reply
      • AHA says

        April 6, 2015 at 2:58 PM

        I’ve had questions about this too. As far as social goes, it seems like it would be more helpful to have the medium as “post,” “share,” and “paid.” “Post” would show traffic from posts by the brand to their social sites. “Share” would show shares of content through social media share bars, and “paid” would show social media ads.

        Then, list the social channel of that post, share, or ad in the source: facebook.com, twitter.com, etc.

        I’m not sure if GA accepts this, though. It seems like they really force you to use “social” in the medium.

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          June 25, 2015 at 5:24 PM

          You would just need to add these to your Social bucket in the Default Channel Grouping settings in the Admin section. (I show you how to do this in the guide.)

          Reply
  39. Jess Bahr says

    February 19, 2015 at 3:45 PM

    Hi Annie,

    Great write up, but the informaiton you have about SocialFlow’s UTM tagging is not 100% right.

    Users are able to set tracking tags for any platform (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc.) that are automatically appended to all links shared from that social account or content coming from any specific RSS feed. Users can also override these default tags when composing.

    We find that automatically appending tags is a great workflow solution and saves clients time.

    To reiterate though, these tags are defined by the client.

    If you would like to talk about this further or learn more about SocialFlow please let me know. I would be happy to jump on a call.

    Best,

    Jess

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2015 at 7:44 PM

      Sorry for the horrifically late response! I didn’t realize I wasn’t receiving comment alerts. :/

      But every link I’ve seen that’s been tagged with SocialFlow has been tagged incorrectly with SocialFlow as the medium, so perhaps you guys can provide more guidance.

      Reply
      • Jess says

        January 10, 2016 at 11:17 AM

        Hi Anne,

        I’m guilty of the same and didn’t see your reply until just now 🙂

        It’s actually intentional. Many of our clients are using GA with a more robust setup including custom defined channels so including SocialFlow in the utm_medium tag is how they prefer to have their traffic segmented.

        They want to track the traffic generated from social media content they are sharing through their page (and from SocialFlow) separate from content their employees or fans are sharing on those same social media platforms. They use a non-common setup to minimize the chance that someone else has setup the same tracking structure.

        I frequently share this guide as a resource, so many have followed your steps 🙂

        Best,

        Jess

        Reply
        • Jess says

          January 10, 2016 at 11:19 AM

          Many who aren’t using the utm_medium=socialflow 🙂

          Reply
          • Annie Cushing says

            January 10, 2016 at 9:04 PM

            Good! I hope you can get the word out to other users to help them avoid this mistake. 🙂

        • Annie Cushing says

          January 10, 2016 at 9:20 PM

          It should never be intentional to tag medium as SocialFlow. If they tag this way, all of their social reports will under-report. Their tagged traffic will already show up separately from organic social traffic, so segmentation is a piece of cake. You can use this custom report to see how the traffic breaks down: http://bit.ly/1PmKIvV. If you click on “(not set)” you’ll drill down to the social networks that drove traffic to your site organically. I hope this helps.

          Reply
          • Mauricio says

            May 26, 2016 at 2:49 AM

            Exactly Right!

          • Jess says

            September 23, 2016 at 2:17 PM

            Hi Annie,

            If you’re only following Google Analytic’s default channels, then yes, the data would be under-reproted. This is not the typical setup nor advised best practice BUT some people chose to customize how they setup and run their analytics program.

            Definitely not an advised best practice, but something that some folks do 🙂

          • Annie Cushing says

            September 23, 2016 at 5:42 PM

            I have no idea what you just said. But since social is a valid default channel, and SocialFlow data SHOULD report within that default channel. Site owners should not, under any circumstance, use a custom channel for social data. And I stand my ground on SocialFlow not being used as a medium. SocialFlow is doing its customers a great disservice by setting that as the default since, unless customers customize their Social channel to include this mistagged traffic, it will show up in the (Other) channel, i.e., Google’s junk drawer where good data goes to die.

  40. Aaron says

    February 26, 2015 at 11:33 AM

    Thank you for showing how to correct the default channel groupings. I was having a tough time collecting data from comparison shopping engines, but this new information should make it really helpful to segment that data now.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2015 at 7:33 PM

      Sorry for the horrifically late response! I didn’t realize I wasn’t receiving comment alerts. :/

      But you’re very welcome! That’s a really cool feature that hasn’t gotten enough air time.

      Reply
  41. Jin says

    March 9, 2015 at 12:32 PM

    For a display ad in an email, would you tag the channel for that as email or display? Thanks.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 2, 2015 at 7:22 PM

      Sorry for the horrifically late response! I didn’t realize I wasn’t receiving comment alerts. :/

      I would tag that as display, but I would include something about the email in the optional content parameter.

      Reply
  42. Emran Hamza says

    March 31, 2015 at 3:07 AM

    Thanks Annie! I love campaign tagging, but can see ways to use it better now.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 31, 2015 at 6:46 PM

      Fantastic!

      Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 31, 2015 at 10:34 PM

      Fantastic, Emran! Then my job here is done. 🙂

      Reply
  43. Kenny Wyland says

    April 10, 2015 at 6:44 PM

    Thanks, Annie! What an amazingly helpful step-by-step description of how to properly tag my campaigns!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 25, 2015 at 5:23 PM

      You’re welcome! 🙂

      Reply
  44. Michael Friedman says

    April 20, 2015 at 5:01 PM

    Annie, great post! For years I’ve worked with Omniture and have come up with a fairly rigorous and successful campaign naming convention that I use with one of my clients for their Google PPC efforts. As part of their campaign ID query string, their AdWords destination URLs include {keyword}, {matchtype} and {adposition}. I now have a new client who uses GA. Being less familiar with GA, I wondered if it’s possible to append those query parameters onto the string along with the standard utm ones you covered above? It should be noted that I want to capture the actual keyword the visitor typed that triggered my ad. So, if I bid on a term that is broad matched, I’d like to capture the entire term in the search box. Make sense? So, if it is possible to add these additional parameters to the destination urls, how would one do so…by separating each element with a “+” or “%20” or something else?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 25, 2015 at 5:23 PM

      It is possible, but I’d take advantage of AdWords’ auto tagging capabilities. It will be less work for you.

      Reply
  45. Laurent says

    May 11, 2015 at 2:54 PM

    Hi
    Can I use tagging for email links (a href=”mailto=test@yahoo.com”) or is it only applicable to url link?
    Cheers
    Laurent

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 25, 2015 at 5:22 PM

      Only URLs.

      Reply
  46. Lee says

    May 12, 2015 at 10:35 AM

    Fantastic Article!

    Quick question:

    I have set up this URL for a Facebook Ad that is currently running:

    https://www.picacreditunion.com/loans/mortgage?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Banner&utm_campaign=pfcu_cpn_mort_050515

    It has been a week now, and I am not seeing this campaign appear under campaigns in Google Analytics. I am not sure what I have done wrong. Any help would be very appreciated.

    Thanks!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 25, 2015 at 5:21 PM

      Have you tried clicking on the link and looking for the visit using the real-time reports?

      A few unsolicited pieces of advice:

      – I’d use lowercase for everything.
      – I’d add “.com” to facebook.
      – I’d use + signs instead of underscores in the campaign name. These will translate into spaces into GA (and your reports), which are easier to read.

      Reply
  47. Christine Kim says

    May 27, 2015 at 3:29 PM

    Hi Annie,
    Thanks for the really helpful guide! I’ve been scouring Google Analytics videos, articles, and trying to self-learn without much luck in finding answers. Basically, I’d been adding custom campaign tagging to each link we sent out in our email newsletters. I wanted to see how many folks landed on our giving page via each email campaign. Seemed simple…except I can’t for the life of me actually FIND this data. I go to Reporting –> Acquisitions –> All Campaigns, and nada. All I get are (not set) or (none) which is odd, since there must be at least ONE person who clicked via the custom tagged links (i.e. ME when I testd the links). How come no data shows? I don’t get it…it’s as if Google Analytics is telling me no one visited our page via the email campaigns but I know that’s wrong! Is there something I’m doing wrong? I used the URL builder and everything…how do I create a report that shows me the effectiveness of these campaigns!?

    A frustrated coordinator in need of expert advice,
    Christine

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 25, 2015 at 5:18 PM

      Hi Christine, I’d search for “utm_” in your All Pages report. If you’re not including at least the utm_medium and utm_source parameters Google won’t be able to parse the campaign parameter values from your URLs. Even thought utm_campaign isn’t required, I highly recommend including it. Why go to all the trouble of campaign tagging and not name your campaigns?

      Reply
  48. Jerome says

    May 28, 2015 at 6:07 AM

    Hi,
    I usually use Excellent Analytics but today I can’t connect to my Analytics account. The error message is “invalid password/usernam”.
    I tried to login to my analytics account and there is no problem.
    Do I need to add proxy ?
    Could you help me please ?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 25, 2015 at 5:16 PM

      I think Excellent Analytics broke when Google moved to Oauth2 login. :/

      Reply
  49. Casey C says

    June 19, 2015 at 4:33 PM

    Hi Annie!

    Thank you for this wonderful guide! I’ve been looking through it all week and trying to figure out applications for my clients. I haven’t gotten into campaign tagging yet. If you do have a minute, I have two questions for you that popped up as I was thinking about this:

    1. Is there any kind of testing environment you’d recommend for trying campaign tags before implementation? I read your post “How To Trash Your Google Analytics Account With Campaign Tagging” which has me a little concerned that a simple mistake could irreparably wreck data.

    2. Are the cpc, display, and banner media for campaign tags more for online advertising outside of using Google Adwords? I can’t think of why someone would set up campaign tags for a Google Adwords campaign with the Adwords reporting already available in GA.

    Thanks again!,
    Casey C

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 25, 2015 at 5:15 PM

      Hi Casey!

      You’re very welcome! Glad it helped. 🙂

      1. It’s kind of tough to “test” your campaign tagging unless you have a subdomain that’s filtered out of your GA view (fka profile) that you can play with. But you’re not going to break anything w/ campaign tagging (unless, of course) you use it for links on your own site.

      2. Yes, they are. AdWords offers auto tagging, and you’d be pretty hard pressed to come up with a good reason not to take advantage of that.

      Reply
  50. Josh says

    June 22, 2015 at 6:00 PM

    This is a very helpful guide! Quick question. If you ask an outside partner to send an email, do you recommend tagging the medium as “email” or “partner”?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 23, 2015 at 3:49 PM

      Great question. I would actually use email so that it routes to the email bucket. But you could also use Partner. You would just need to make sure you create a bucket for Partner in the backend so that this traffic doesn’t get routed to the “Other” bucket in the Channels report.

      Reply
  51. Clayton says

    June 23, 2015 at 4:53 PM

    Hi Annie,

    What a wonderful site! THANK YOU!

    I have 2 questions.

    1) Should I use .com at the of the source name for linkedin, twitter, and facebook? Are there cases where I should use .com and then not use .com? Will it make a difference?

    2) What is the difference in your URL spreadsheet between destination url and raw url?

    Thanks so much!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 25, 2015 at 5:12 PM

      Thank you! Glad you like it!

      1) I always include the TLD b/c I want my tagged sources to blend in w/ untagged sources (ergo, follow the same format). And when you look at the Referrals report, the TLD (e.g., facebook.com) is included.

      2) I’m not sure what you mean here. You enter the destination URL, and it will add the parameters for you.

      Reply
  52. Andy says

    June 25, 2015 at 2:28 PM

    Fantastic resource, thank you so much for sharing. We use a lot of email follow up sequences and I love the notion of tracking the performance of each email in turn.

    Would you suggest using content and term for that? For instance, if I had a 5-email sequence to welcome customers, might the third have the following setup:
    – Medium: email
    – Source: Infusionsoft
    – Campaign: New Customer Welcome
    – Content: Email 3
    – Term: Text Link (or Footer Link, Image Link)

    Thanks!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 25, 2015 at 5:01 PM

      Yes, that’s exactly what I’d recommend! And glad you like the guide. 🙂

      Reply
  53. andrew simonport says

    June 29, 2015 at 3:15 PM

    Very nice! I love the way Google Analytics is able to provide me with all the neccessary stats of my page. I would like one day to have my own online store and be able to sell many things and have GA provide me with some very important information that I would need. I seen many interesting articles that have taught and guided me. Thank you for your article.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 30, 2015 at 9:06 AM

      My pleasure! And best of luck with that store! 🙂

      Reply
  54. Evan R. Murphy says

    June 29, 2015 at 6:10 PM

    This guide was super useful. Thanks, Annie!

    Question: Say I send an email with a link tagged utm_medium=email. Then someone copies that link with the parameters and shares it on Facebook. When their friends follow that link, will Google Analytics classify their visit as medium “social” (since it came from Facebook) or “email” (since I tagged it utm_medium=email)?

    Reply
    • Evan R. Murphy says

      June 29, 2015 at 7:26 PM

      Ok, I’m pretty sure that it would show up as “email”. utm_medium will override the default mechanism Google Analytics uses to detect the medium. Please let me know if that’s wrong.

      I like the way you recommend using utm_medium, utm_source and utm_campaign for ease of use. But because of the above it seems like data is lost. If someone shares the link to a different medium, the medium will be misdetected. If someone posted my link with utm_medium=email&utm_source=mailchimp to Reddit and it blew up, Google Analytics would think all that extra traffic came from email rather than Reddit.

      So I’m actually leaning toward stuffing the original medium, source and campaign name all into utm_campaign and not using the other utm parameters. This way my originally-emailed link shared on Reddit would come through with medium “referral”, “reddit.com” and campaign “email-mailchimp-newsletter-5” and all the data is preserved. The drawback is having to use regexes to filter through all that narrow utm_campaign data.

      Reply
      • Evan R. Murphy says

        June 29, 2015 at 7:28 PM

        *medium “referral”, source“reddit.com”…

        Reply
      • Annie Cushing says

        June 30, 2015 at 9:05 AM

        That won’t work. If you only use the campaign parameter Google won’t parse the link at all, and you won’t get any campaign data in GA. Your URL will show up in content reports as /my-landing-page?utm_campaign=your-parameters.

        Reply
        • Evan R. Murphy says

          June 30, 2015 at 3:15 PM

          Thanks for replying, Annie. So utm_medium and utm_source are required parameters?

          Reply
          • Annie Cushing says

            July 1, 2015 at 10:27 AM

            Yes, that’s correct.

  55. Jacob Robinson says

    July 24, 2015 at 10:11 AM

    Great post Annie! It’s been super helpful. We are trying to set up our blog tagging but want to make sure it’s done correctly. Medium = Email, but we’re not sure what to set Source & Campaign to.

    Would Campaign be the specific blog post name, and source be “Blog”?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      July 25, 2015 at 5:24 PM

      For email, source isn’t really relevant since the link doesn’t “live” on a site. Most sites use internal or the name of their email service (e.g., utm_source=mailchimp). But some use it as an extra field they can use for more granular tracking.

      Reply
  56. Rodney Bautista says

    August 4, 2015 at 2:07 PM

    I am planning to track our offline Catalog Campaign in Google Analytics. The typical way I’ve seen this done is through using a vanity URL that then redirects to the main site with UTM parameters attached to the redirect.

    My questions is, if my site is widgets.com and I use widgets.com/catalog2015 as my vanity URL, does that violate your rule of never tagging internal links? Should I use a completely different domain?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      August 4, 2015 at 2:43 PM

      Not at all. That’s a perfect use because visitors won’t be clicking on links that live on your site that are tagged with UTM parameters. They’re coming from off the site, and that traffic would show up as direct without your tags. Pat yourself on the back for such a brilliant idea. 🙂

      Reply
      • Rodney Bautista says

        August 4, 2015 at 4:30 PM

        Thanks for the clarification! If I’m using the same domain, wouldn’t these visitors still come up as a self-referral in Google Analytics, even with the UTM codes appended in the redirect? I’m afraid of screwing up my internal events or somehow double-counting. I’ve thought about using a completely different domain to assuage my concerns, but it would complicate branding and awareness for the site.

        Btw, this is an awesome blog and I am now a fan!

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          August 4, 2015 at 5:55 PM

          Ah! A year ago I would have said no way. But given the fact that Google Analytics now excludes self-referrals by default in Universal, I’d encourage you to stay away from using yoursite.com as the domain. Maybe use the name of the catalog or something. The reason for this is if you go to Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Referral Exclusion List and see your domain, all traffic from your domain (IOW, utm_source=yourdomain.com) will be funneled into your direct traffic bucket.

          But, besides that little oddity, if you assign the medium, source, and campaign to a link, that’s what will show up in GA.

          Hope that makes sense!

          Reply
  57. Tom Slage says

    August 10, 2015 at 12:57 PM

    Annie,

    What a wealth of knowledge in a single post…and you’re actually MAINTAINING the info – double awesome!

    I have a quick question about campaign tagging, and while I didn’t scour all of the comments here, I didn’t this in the post itself: how long does the cookie attribute the session activity to the campaign? Until it’s overwritten? Six months? Is this configurable?

    I’m using campaigns to track my email campaigns (typically two per week) to a fairly captive audience and I’m afraid my numbers are overstating the email impact by “taking credit” for purchases that would have happened anyway. I want this cookie expiration period to be relatively short (24-48 hours) to more tightly attribute purchase activity to the email, and not to just casual reordering.

    Many thanks for any help. Feel like I found a little gold mine in your site here.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      August 18, 2015 at 11:37 AM

      Glad you like the site. 🙂 The campaign cookie lasts six months, but if you’re running Universal, you can customize that by navigating to Admin > Property > Tracking info > Session Settings (screenshot: http://www.screencast.com/t/v5WOGC91yr).

      Reply
  58. Scott Carvin says

    August 30, 2015 at 4:05 PM

    This is a great post, thanks for sharing!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      August 30, 2015 at 8:53 PM

      My pleasure!

      Reply
  59. ThomasA says

    August 31, 2015 at 7:49 AM

    Hi Annie,
    i ran into a prblem and after days and days of research I wasn’t able to find the answer:
    What you neet to know:
    Report 1:
    – dimension: medium, metric: sessions
    – the medium “cpc” shows 4857 sessions

    Report 2:
    – dimension: defaukt channel grouping, metric: sessions
    – under “Branded Paid Search” i see 979 sessions
    – under “Generic Paid Search” i see 405 session
    – under “Paid Search” i see 7 sessions
    Total Paid Search Sessions: 1391

    For my understanding the medium cpc and the paid traffic from the default channel grouping should be at leas roughly identicsl. But ther’sa HUGE difference.

    Now I am aware how to change the Default Channel Grouping and make my own custom one, but HOW do I understand and change the medium. Btw the more correct cpc numbers are shown by the defautl channel grouping. The medium must be totally wrong.

    I don’t use campaign tracking for the cpc (long story). So all this grouping (channel and medium) is automatic.

    What do you think? where does this difference come from?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      August 31, 2015 at 6:33 PM

      Is cpc capitalized in the Medium report? If so, Google doesn’t recognize it as being Paid Search. Also, the Paid/Generic search channels are AdWords swim only. So if you’re manually tagging anything utm_medium=cpc, that traffic won’t show up in these buckets.

      Reply
  60. Caroline says

    September 18, 2015 at 2:36 PM

    Traffic1M included this Guide in their email today. I can’t thank you enough for creating this gem. It outdoes what Google put together by miles. Awesome explanation. I’m going to throw this up on Reddit 🙂

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      September 18, 2015 at 6:08 PM

      I’m so glad it helped in some small way, Caroline!

      Reply
  61. Vic says

    September 22, 2015 at 9:47 AM

    Hi Annie,

    I have a client who is using their new domain name in an ad placed on a two different 3rd party websites, and they want to track performance.

    Usually, I’d just send the UTM parameters over to add to the URLs they want to track… but the problem is, this new domain is not currently live and 302 redirects to their existing domain, so as far as I understand, a custom parameter is going to be removed. Certainly appears that way when I test it 🙁

    The obvious solution is to use their current domain in the ad instead so I can just add the UTM parameters, but I don’t think they’ll go for that. The only other ways I can think of is asking their developer to do some mad rewrite rules that stop the parameter from being stripped out (not easy as the new domain is with their branding company at the mo so he doesn’t have access – plus I’m dubious as to whether it would even work across domains) or ask the branding agency to create 2 pages on the new domain, exclude these pages from the domain level redirect to the current domain, create corresponding pages on the current domain for these pages to redirect to, and then block the pages on the current domain using a noindex so that the only way of reaching them is via the ads. And after all that, I can monitor the number of visits to these pages in GA. (I hope this makes some sense) :/

    *cries*

    I’ve probably overlooked something really obvious that solves this without mad amounts of faffing about, so any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated! 🙂

    Ta,

    Vic

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      September 22, 2015 at 1:14 PM

      I’ve had campaign parameters carry over w/ 301 redirects, but I’ve never tested 302 redirects. You might want to test 301s. Alternatively, you could just have the new domain redirect to a page on the old site that contains query parameters. You typically use this strategy with things like vanity URLs. It’a a bit of a last resort.

      Reply
  62. Disha says

    September 28, 2015 at 12:02 AM

    Awesome post! If a client insists on using the Campaign term parameter (for non-paid campaigns), what are some of the best values that it could take? Thanks.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      September 29, 2015 at 12:29 AM

      Thanks, Disha! I use the campaign parameter for things like banner size (e.g., utm_content=300×200) and position in an email (e.g., header, footer, text, etc.). But you can literally use it for anything.

      Reply
  63. Sebastian Scaramuzza says

    October 1, 2015 at 7:31 PM

    Annie – really – this is the best guide about campaigns tagging I ever read. Seriously! Thank you sooo much.

    I’ve been using utm parameters since 2012 without really knowing what I was doing. I felt it was useful, but I couldn’t actually find any CLARIFICATION. Google Analytics Help itself doesn’t help much.

    I’m one of those who fu***d up their analytics with messy data… 😀 I printed your guide and sticked to the wall as my Analytics Bible!

    I’d like to ask you for one suggestion. How would you tag the URL used in a blog comment (see mine in this comment itself)? In particular, what would you use as Campaign and Medium?

    …ut more in general, when there’s no really a campaign running. For example, I’m a developer and always put a credit link in the footer of the customer’s website. I used to put the page’s permalink as utm_campaign.

    Or, as another example, a signature for a forum or e-mail. I’m still a bit confused about this…

    Thanks for this great article,
    Goodbye

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      October 5, 2015 at 10:53 AM

      So glad it’s helped you. First of all, I don’t tag every link on the web. Campaign tagging is really just for that: actual marketing campaigns. For example, if you didn’t tag blog comments, you’d be able to see the full URL people came from. You don’t get that with campaign tagging – at least not without some serious engineering (like putting the referral in utm_source and page path in another campaign parameter, e.g., utm_content). But if you consider blog commenting a campaign, then go for it. You could tag utm_source as the site you’re leaving the comment on and the medium as comments.

      As far as my email signature goes, I tag my medium as email, but I could also create a bucket for all signatures that I call signature. Just remember that if you create a new medium, you need to create a channel for it, which I explain how to do in the guide. This is really important. Otherwise, these visits will show up in the dreaded “Other” channel.

      Reply
  64. Rachel Jacob says

    October 7, 2015 at 5:12 PM

    Annie,

    As all have said, great guide.
    I downloaded your spreadsheet and noticed there are the columns labeled as “Destination URL” and “Raw URL.” What are the differences in these columns and which one should we use for tracking? I noticed for the “Raw URL” entries under the Example Campaign tab, that utm_medium begins with a question mark (?), where as in the Destination URL entries it is preceded with an ampersand (&).

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      October 8, 2015 at 10:55 AM

      I have comments in each of the headers in the original Google Doc (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlgVNSddFpwxdEV1R3NtTFNQdDFvZExIbmFVZjZhdVE&usp=drive_web#gid=0). You should check them out. They walk you through how to use the document. Once you understand it, you can use those same steps in your downloaded copy.

      Reply
      • Rachel Jacob says

        October 8, 2015 at 2:13 PM

        Annie,

        Originally I did try hovering over the headings for comments (for both the original copy and a downloaded copy) and neither are working. I thought perhaps it was a browser issue and opened the file in both internet explorer and chrome, same issue.

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          October 8, 2015 at 2:37 PM

          Wow, I didn’t know Google took away the ability to see comments in a file you don’t own. This is new and really hinders the effectiveness of comments. Sigh.

          I added the instructions in to the cells above each of the columns. It looks a wreck now, but at least it’s functional.

          Reply
          • Rachel Jacob says

            October 15, 2015 at 10:36 AM

            No worries, nice to know I wasn’t going crazy! Thank you for being so on top of your comments section, it really helps those who are newbies to google analytics to be able to quickly converse with someone who can explain things better than the analytics help section!

          • Rachel Jacob says

            October 15, 2015 at 10:43 AM

            Also it doesn’t look that bad! After downloading a copy (either in google docs or excel) users can copy and paste the text and insert them as comments. Takes only a few minutes. 🙂

          • Annie Cushing says

            October 15, 2015 at 6:41 PM

            Happy to help!

  65. Alex Lee says

    October 7, 2015 at 11:57 PM

    Great post. I am just wondering how do I view the URLs in the report? Let’s say I have a very successful campaign and most of them are from facebook.com / social, how can I break this information down into the individual links I’ve shared? This is assuming I am sharing different URLs.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      October 8, 2015 at 12:53 PM

      I created an animated gif with the steps you’d take to find the landing pages for a particular campaign: http://goo.gl/Z9eFIk. But you can change the primary dimension to Landing Page for all of the campaign reports in GA.

      Reply
  66. Julia Oleskey says

    October 14, 2015 at 1:25 PM

    Thanks for the post. I’m trying to track individual print campaign success at driving traffic to a website that I don’t own. Is it possible to use google analytics for this since I don’t own the website, or could I list different bit.ly URLs to the same website URL to track our various efforts? Thank you!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      October 14, 2015 at 2:01 PM

      Yeah, using bitly links would be the best strategy. Since you don’t have access to their data and you can’t even monitor clicks, there’s no other way to track clicks.

      Tip: Adding a + after the bitly URL will open the analytics on any bitly URL.

      Reply
  67. Philippe says

    November 23, 2015 at 10:25 PM

    Hi and thank you for the work !

    What about using terms for ad set targeting with facebook ads ?

    Cheers

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      November 25, 2015 at 4:59 PM

      That parameter is there for the taking. I tend to use the content parameter before the term parameter though b/c it could be confusing for people downstream to see data that isn’t a term/keyword. But it’s a matter of preference.

      Reply
  68. Shlomi says

    November 24, 2015 at 12:37 PM

    Hi there!

    I tag links between 2 websites I manage.

    The referral path or full refrral are missing in my reports, and usually show as (not set), while link that aren’t tags show the referral. Is there a known work around here?

    I came across this paragraph, but didn’t help me so far:
    “Also, when you tag links to someone else’s site they don’t get as much info about your site, such as what page the traffic came from. (You need to use a custom report that uses the Full Referrer dimension to get this. It’s not in any of the standard reports. You can use this custom report as a template.)”

    Thanks ahead 🙂

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      November 25, 2015 at 4:57 PM

      You don’t get full referrer with tagged links. It makes sense if you think about it. Full referrer is just source + referral path stitched together. With campaign tagging, you’re overwriting the source. This is why I don’t recommend tagging links on static URLs, like blog posts on a sister/partner site. It’s better to treat it as a referral and maybe create a custom channel of Partner with your partner sites to more carefully track traffic from those sites. You can learn all about creating custom channels with my guide: https://www.annielytics.com/guides/definitive-guide-to-channel-groupings-google-analytics/. Hope this helps!

      Reply
  69. Joe Librizzi says

    December 2, 2015 at 3:02 PM

    Annie, this post is amazing! I’ve been reading a ton on campaign tagging recently in an effort to improve my tagging structure and this is easily one of the best pieces I’ve found.

    I wonder if you have any advice for tagging affiliate campaigns. My gut is telling me to go with
    utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source={affiliate name/id}&utm_campaign=free+trial&utm_content={ad unit name/id}

    but I’ve seen others suggest that source should be the affiliate network (e.g. commission+junction) and either campaign or content should define the affiliate name.

    Do you agree the identifying the affiliate network is more valuable than some other data point? Do you have a preferred syntax for affiliates?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      December 3, 2015 at 12:25 PM

      Hi Joe!

      I think the only reason people use the affiliate network is so they can upload the links to the network for all to use. I think it’s much better to use the affiliate name (if that’s possible with your network). Or if you use query parameters, you can grab the affiliate name/ID from a parameter using Google Tag Manager. Or you could create a custom channel for Affiliate and manually add your affiliates to it in GA. I demonstrate how to create channels in this post: https://www.annielytics.com/guides/definitive-guide-to-channel-groupings-google-analytics/.

      Reply
  70. Jeffrey DeArmond says

    December 5, 2015 at 8:59 PM

    Great post Annie. I need to start incorporating tagging into more of our client marketing campaigns for more efficient data within the analytic accounts. Your post will help us accomplish this. Thanks!.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      December 5, 2015 at 9:26 PM

      Awesome, Jeffrey! I’m doing a really comprehensive webinar with Moz this Tue (1:30 – 3pm EST) that will cover campaign tagging and channel groupings. If you have both down and understand how each impacts the other, you will kill campaign tracking! Here’s a link to sign up: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5715850050493825026. And I wrote this public Facebook post to give an overview of what I’ll be covering: https://www.facebook.com/irishannie/posts/10153772296826880.

      Reply
  71. Sam Mazaheri says

    December 15, 2015 at 2:59 PM

    Hey Annie, It looks like an update to Google Docs broke the destination URL formula in the Campaign Tagging Tool . Now the first UTM parameter starts with an ampersand (&) instead of a question mark (?) which breaks the URL. I noticed this today in my clone of your awesome spreadsheet. Can you review your spreadsheet and fill us in on the solution? Thanks!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      December 16, 2015 at 1:02 PM

      Thanks for the head’s up! Oddly enough, the tilde character in my formula was a casualty of the upgrade. Silly Google ….

      But it’s all fixed now. 🙂

      Reply
      • Sam Mazaheri says

        December 16, 2015 at 6:15 PM

        Perfecto! Adding that ~ fixed it. Thanks!

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          December 16, 2015 at 10:07 PM

          Yeah, it was in there before, or the formula wouldn’t have ever worked. It’s weird that it was lost in the last update.

          Reply
          • Laure Sabatier says

            January 13, 2016 at 2:30 PM

            Hello Annie,

            Thank you very much for sharing this excel spreadsheet. I would have never been able to create such a complex formula. And it’s very generous to share this amazing work.
            The formula IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“~?”,B12)),”&”,”?”) applied a “?” at any instance. Some of my URL already have a “?”, some don’t… (for instance http://noca.convio.net/site/Ecard?ecard_id=1101&s_locale=fr_CA and http://ovariancanada.org/events-support).
            I’m writing you this comment just as an FYI because I found that replacing this bit of formula by IF(ISERR(SEARCH(“~?”, B4)), “?”, “&”) is working better (for me at least).

            Best,

          • Annie Cushing says

            January 14, 2016 at 6:55 AM

            Very cool! I’ll have to try it out. Thanks!

  72. Paul says

    February 23, 2016 at 12:44 AM

    Hello Annie,

    Thank you for the very helpful article! I have bookmarked it 🙂

    I found this post while researching why Buffer was changing my UTM tags. I wish to tag social media posts that drive traffic to my website so that I can identify which posts generate the best traffic & conversions. However rather than seeing the campaign title I am seeing:

    Campaign: Buffer
    Source: Twitter.com
    Medium: Social

    Is there a good alternative to Buffer that will avoid this problem, e.g. Hootsuite? Or is there another more simple workaround whereby I can still use Buffer?

    Thanks!
    Paul

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      February 23, 2016 at 4:15 PM

      So that traffic coming from Buffer is from visitors to your site using [most likely] the Buffer Chrome extension to share your content. So even if you switched to Hootsuite, it’s not going to impact that. You use campaign tags that make sense to you to track your shares. Everything else that come in as social (whether it was shared via Buffer, Hootsuite, some other tool, or your social buttons) should count as your more “organic” social traffic, i.e., social traffic that wasn’t the direct result of one of your social shares. Hope that makes sense!

      Reply
      • Paul says

        February 23, 2016 at 8:29 PM

        Thank you for your kind reply. A clearer example of my problem is:

        Each month I post 10 tweets on my Twitter feed directing my followers to 2 different campaigns on my website.

        I set up links in the tweets with 2 different UTM tags, one for each campaign:

        Campaign: Free-Lauda-Poster
        Source: Twitter.com
        Medium: Social

        Campaign: Half-Price-Membership
        Source: Twitter.com
        Medium: Social

        Problem is: if I use Buffer to schedule the tweets, they are reported without the campaign UTM in Google Analytics and are all grouped as:

        Campaign: Buffer
        Source: Twitter.com
        Medium: Social

        I have tried using Hootsuite and it tags my campaigns exactly as per my UTM tags so this resolves the problem. Just wondered if there was a workaround so I can still use Buffer but tag my campaigns as I wish. 🙂 Thanks!

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          February 23, 2016 at 10:10 PM

          Oh yeah, I know what you’re talking about now! This is precisely why I don’t use Buffer to schedule social shares for my own site. I use TweetDeck. But I will reach out to the Buffer team and revisit this issue. Perhaps they could write a rule that looks for campaign parameters in the URL and doesn’t overwrite them if they’re present. A girl can dream …

          But if you don’t hear back from me (and I will let you know if they amend their tagging policy ) don’t use them for scheduling. Sorry. Wish I had better news for you!

          Reply
          • Paul says

            February 24, 2016 at 2:42 AM

            Thank you for your kind help and good to hear i’m not the only one with this issue. I think I will switch to Hootsuite in this case.

            I have another question if you would be kind enough to help. In the Google Analytics campaign reporting for my UTM tags, duplicate campaign names are appearing for the same UTM link.

            For example:

            Destination URL: http://www.solving-utm-tag-problems.com
            Campaign: half-price-membership
            Source: Twitter.com
            Medium: Social

            In the Google Analytics reporting, the campaign name “half-price-membership” should appear, however, I am getting traffic coming to 3 separate results:

            half-price-membership
            half-price-membership/
            half-price-membership?mob=0

            I suspect the cause of this is that visitors clicking the same UTM link are arriving at different URLs for the same landing page because of the way the website is set up. Do you think I am correct? If so, is there a simple work around so that only one campaign name is reported in Google Analytics?

            Thank you again for your awesome help!

  73. Annie Cushing says

    February 24, 2016 at 10:35 PM

    Hi Paul!

    Happy to help! Could you include a screenshot of the report, so I can see what you mean by results? I can’t tell if these “results” are campaign names or landing pages:

    half-price-membership
    half-price-membership/
    half-price-membership?mob=0

    If you don’t feel comfortable posting here, you can email me at annie(at)annielytics(dot)com!

    Reply
  74. Shaun Burgess says

    March 3, 2016 at 11:28 PM

    Hi Annie

    I am working on a GA naming convention schema for the Cancer Council and working with the social team (who use Hootsuite in which we will set up some automated appends they can use).

    My question is for a source of “facebook” do you typically see use of mediums such as “social” and “cpc” to denote an organic post link versus a paid (boosted etc..) post or ad? We will be adding other Campaign and and Content parameters to both organic posts and paid ads on facebook but I am unsure whether people in the main refer to the organic post as “social” and paid for example “cpc” (even though the paid models are more varied/complex)

    I am thinking this would be similar in concept to google engine traffic being denoted in the Medium as “organic” or paid as “cpc”.

    I hope that kind of made sense?

    Regards
    Shaun

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 13, 2016 at 5:15 PM

      Hi Shaun,

      Setting medium to cpc causes it to route to Paid Search (which is why I don’t like using for paid social). If you’re running campaigns such as AdWords, you’ll have paid social showing up in the same bucket.

      Personally, I would prefer to have paid social in its own channel. I recommend using a custom medium like paid+social (which will show up as ‘paid social’ in reports). Then you would create a custom channel of Paid Social using the definition medium regex matches ‘paid social’ (sans quotes). This way you can compare your organic social to your paid social and your paid search traffic.

      You can learn how to create custom channels here: https://www.annielytics.com/guides/definitive-guide-to-channel-groupings-google-analytics/.

      Hope this helps!

      Reply
  75. Sal says

    March 9, 2016 at 10:03 AM

    HI there, Great article, thank you! Could you help me with something – I set up a recent facebook paid post with this link: http://www.website.com//jackets/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=JacketsMobile but its fallen into the ‘Other’ Channel instead of Social – why is this please? whats wrong with the link that I’ve built? Thanks

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 9, 2016 at 1:49 PM

      Hey Sal!

      Setting medium to cpc causes it to route to Paid Search (which is why I don’t like using for paid social). But it shouldn’t be going into your (Other) bucket. You can see how different channels are defined here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3297892?hl=en.

      Reply
  76. Bob Grey says

    March 16, 2016 at 11:08 PM

    Great article!! I have a problem though where my custom campaign report is showing traffic to urls that I haven’t appended the utm codes??

    Eg. the landing page is:
    http://site.com/articlepage.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=free%20widget&utm_campaign=widget

    However when I run my source/medium report by landing page, I get a lot more landing pages than what I’m actually promoting.

    For example, GA tells me i promoted the homepage, which i actually didn’t. Also a bunch of category pages are reported as landing pages as well. I don’t promote home pages or category pages only article pages.

    Why does GA tell me I have promoted a page when I haven’t?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 17, 2016 at 8:31 AM

      You may be sending PPC traffic to pages that are redirecting to these pages. Sometimes the utm parameters get passed in the redirect. I’d run all of your landing pages through a crawler like Screaming Frog to make sure they’re all resolving to a 200 status code.

      Reply
  77. Chris McCreery says

    March 21, 2016 at 2:15 PM

    Hey Annie, also noticed another email tool that doesn’t have it quite right. Constant Contact likes to use utm_medium=socialshare for their social sharing links with in emails. 🙁

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 23, 2016 at 10:59 PM

      Good to know! So frustrating.

      Reply
  78. Pedro says

    April 1, 2016 at 8:40 AM

    Thank you for this amazing resource!

    I use campaign tagging, but have a bizarre issue with it, in that it still comes through as direct sometimes in GA. Sometimes clicking on a link to the site from Facebook without the tag comes through as direct and sometimes a link comes through as Facebook. I thought the campaign tagging would fix this, but it doesn’t. The campaign tags aren’t being stripped, they’re visible in the URL, and do work sometimes.

    For example, I open the link from Facebook (desktop) in different browsers and then check it in GA real-time. In one browser it might come through with the correct tracking in the right bucket, but in other browsers it sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t. (it doesn’t seem to be the same for any browser all the time).

    Any help or resource you can point to would be much appreciated.
    Thank you again!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 6, 2016 at 12:27 AM

      Hi Pedro,

      I’d have to be able to test it myself to figure out why this would be happening. There are a number of different possibilities, but most of them center around user error.

      Reply
  79. Debbie Kay says

    April 24, 2016 at 8:16 AM

    Hurray for mentioning Wistia Fresh URLs as well – saw it on Eager.io and use it as a plugin but this is the first time I’m seeing anyone endorse it!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      April 25, 2016 at 4:26 PM

      Yeah, it was so cool of them to create that for the marketing community!

      Reply
  80. green filter Germany says

    May 13, 2016 at 1:40 AM

    Your blog is very nice and I like it your blog keep sharing with your new article….

    Reply
  81. Randy Downs says

    May 14, 2016 at 10:57 AM

    Awesome resource. It’s going to be my go-to guide in the future. I had not considered how complex and useful campaign tagging could be.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      May 14, 2016 at 12:22 PM

      Awesome! Glad it helps!

      Reply
  82. Mauricio says

    May 26, 2016 at 6:36 AM

    Hi Annie.
    When doing Facebook organic AND paid posting – assuming i am promoting the exact same campaign and content – Would it be correct to tag the campaign this way…
    ORGANIC POST
    mywebsite.com/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=organic+posts&utm_content=Santa+with+Kids&utm_campaign=Xmas+2016
    PAID POST
    mywebsite.com/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=paid+posts&utm_content=Santa+with+Kids&utm_campaign=Xmas+2016

    Or would you suggest a better way?
    Thanks for confirming Annie

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 7, 2016 at 2:26 PM

      No. Organic social should always be tagged utm_medium=social. That’s the only way that traffic will show up in your social reports. And paid+posts works only if you create a custom channel from that medium. I go into more detail here: https://www.annielytics.com/blog/analytics/track-social-ads-google-analytics/.

      Reply
  83. Manu Kivila says

    June 7, 2016 at 7:16 AM

    Hi Annie! Thanks for an amazing article. I shared it with my colleagues as well.

    Only one questions regarding to this:
    “Visits from webmail providers that default to a secure server (such as Gmail and Hotmail) don’t pass referrer data”.

    I checked my reports and found “mail.google.com” as a source – http://prntscr.com/bde17b
    Is it possible that Gmail passes referrer data somehow even if it uses https? It’s a bit unclear for me right now.

    Thanks again! 🙂

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 7, 2016 at 2:20 PM

      Those most likely come from people who didn’t accept the default setting of secure.

      Reply
  84. L says

    June 7, 2016 at 10:58 AM

    You mentioned to add “.com” to the source but you never actually said why. What are the drawbacks to not tagging using “.com”?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 7, 2016 at 2:22 PM

      Yes, I went into quite a bit of detail as to why I recommend keeping the TLD. It’s so your tagged sources blend with other sources. All sources maintain the TLD except for organic search. For ex, Google referrals come in as google.com, whereas Google organic comes in as google.

      Reply
  85. L says

    June 7, 2016 at 11:06 AM

    Oh also you don’t seem to mention referral as a medium – Why do you not use referral? Thanks for all of you help and this article is great!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 7, 2016 at 2:24 PM

      I don’t recommend using referral. If it’s really a referral you shouldn’t be tagging. You get more data from untagged referrals than tagged (for ex, the Full Referrer dimension).

      Reply
  86. Manu Kivila says

    June 7, 2016 at 7:06 PM

    Hi again 🙂

    One more question popped into my mind when I read your great audit document. 🙂

    You have said that (regarding to PPC landing pages): “You also don’t want your destination URLs to redirect. If they do, the tracking tags get removed. ”

    Did I understand correctly?

    1) If I check all of my…

    a) PPC landing page URLs
    b) Final URLs

    … and some of them are redirected (301 or 302) then gclid parameters will be removed/stripped and there is no accurate data sent to Google Analytics and Google AdWords (goals imported from Analytics) because some of the URLs are redirected.
    Does the 301 and 302 redirects strip gclid parameters and affect the Analytics and Adwords data?

    2) If I compare the amount of landing page URLs and Final URL’s in Analytics, the difference is about 12 times (12 times more PPC landing pages than PPC Final URLs in AdWords). It seems to be a huge difference. What do you think, what might cause it – redirections?

    Thanks again. Your audit has helped me a lot. You should add this answer to the file as well, if you update it next time. 🙂

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 7, 2016 at 7:19 PM

      Hi Manu,

      Your questions would require quite a bit of testing and access to your GA account. I encourage you to seek out the services of an analytics specialist. I’m booked through August right now. Sorry I couldn’t be more help!

      Reply
  87. Anna says

    June 14, 2016 at 4:46 PM

    I have a question about campaign groupings. I noticed that you said campaign names should be consistent, like naming a monthly newsletter [Month-Year] Newsletter. But what about just using “Newsletter” as the campaign name, and using the date as the content tag? That way, all of your newsletter traffic is in one place and you can get more granular from there. It seems to me that doing so would keep your data cleaner and more organized. I guess it’s similar to the “daily+deals+email” example you gave.

    Would you advise against doing this? What are the benefits and potential downfalls?

    I appreciate this article. It’s an awesome resource and it made me gasp because… *GASP* I’ve been tagging internally 🙁

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 15, 2016 at 10:43 AM

      I am actually a fan of a nice, simple campaign name, so that your campaign doesn’t get too granular. You can always put more detail in the content parameter or tag the medium as newsletter and add newsletter to your email channel definition. I wrote a guide on how to customize channels as well: https://www.annielytics.com/guides/definitive-guide-to-channel-groupings-google-analytics/.

      Reply
      • Anna says

        June 16, 2016 at 5:13 PM

        That makes more sense. Thanks for the tip!

        Reply
  88. L says

    June 15, 2016 at 4:16 PM

    Hello again,

    I was wondering where would social cpc go in default channel groupings?

    For example if I have paid twitter and non paid twitter we would tag non paid twitter as social and paid twitter as cpc but we were wondering if cpc for social would default to “paid search”. Do you recommend tagging it as cpc or just paid?

    Also – I was curious if you see any advantage to customizing default channel groupings or would you just leave it alone?

    Thanks so much – your guide is super helpful! Also, apologies – I realize it’s a lot of questions.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 15, 2016 at 5:45 PM

      I wrote a blog post on customizing channel groupings that you can view here: https://www.annielytics.com/guides/definitive-guide-to-channel-groupings-google-analytics/. And I did a video tutorial on how to tag social ads here: https://www.annielytics.com/blog/analytics/track-social-ads-google-analytics/. Hope these help!

      Reply
  89. Charlie says

    July 27, 2016 at 8:40 PM

    Hi Annie! Love your stuff. Sorry to return to a topic covered in part in the above comments – this is re using campaign tagging in redirects.

    Our branded company site, upon a “login” click takes someone to our portal page that lives on our bigger site, editorialsite.com. Because it is a client portal, our marketing and engagement peeps wanted this to “look” like they were still on the first site so have a vanity url showing companysite.com/client-portal while the “actual” page is editorialsite.com/client-portal

    If i were to modify the redirect, should the tagged link be (with dummy naming!)…

    http://www.companysite.com/client-portal/?utm_source=companysite&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=portal%20entrances

    Just want to get this right – if you have time to let me know much appreciated! If not – your site is already a gold mine / essential reading!

    Charlie

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      July 27, 2016 at 9:05 PM

      Thanks for the kind words, Charlie! At the risk of sounding Bill Clintonesque, it really depends what you mean by “the ‘actual’ page.” I’d look at it in your real-time reports or one of your content reports (e.g., All Pages). If it displays as coming from the same site, you can’t use campaign tagging. If you want to send me actual details, I can take a look and tell you if you can use campaign parameters. annie@annielytics.com

      Reply
  90. Alex Wright says

    September 16, 2016 at 1:30 PM

    Hi Annie-

    Great article. I don’t see a lot of info here on links within Apps, but I apologize if this questions is redundant.

    I’m focused (in this case) on using Campaign Tagging to track incoming traffic from a client’s YouTube videos. The client has ~100 videos and I’ve put Annotations on those videos with links back to various parts of the client’s website. That worked great even without Campaign Tagging – Analytics saw this traffic and gave us valuable feedback. But those Annotations didn’t show up on mobile, and most importantly, not in YouTube’s mobile App, where a huge majority of views happen. So we were missing a lot of where the video views happen.

    YouTube now offers Cards, which are similar to Annotations (with some differences of course) but most notably, they show up on mobile and in the YouTube App. Hello much larger audience!

    However, the traffic from Card clicks doesn’t get tagged (automatically) with youtube.com as the source if the click came from a video played in the App. For the (seemingly obvious) reason that the source here isn’t really youtube.com but the YouTube App.

    I’d like to set up Campaign Tagging just to track the traffic coming from clicks on the client’s videos – Cards and Annotations – and ideally tracking the source of the click – youtube.com, the YouTube App, and possibly other imbedded plays on other websites.

    Is there a way you’d recommend to differentiate traffic coming from the YouTube App versus the youtube.com website? This would be amazing knowledge to have, as YouTube analytics doesn’t provided it.

    What do you suggest as listing for the Source – youtube.com even though many of the clicks will be coming from within the App (which isn’t technically youtube.com)?

    Lastly, we have ~100 videos. I’m thinking of using the video id portion of the URL as the Content parameter so we can know which specific videos are generating the most traffic (and conversions). Even though the video id seems like code gibberish (and thus violates one of your rules), we have lots of spreadsheets that track and list the video id. Does this seem correct in your workflow?

    I checked out your YouTube channel – it’s great – and don’t see that you’re using Cards. I was going to click on one to see how you’ve set up that tagging, but alas.

    Thank you!

    -Alex

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      September 19, 2016 at 1:14 PM

      Hi Alex!

      Does YouTube allow you to edit links in cards? If so, you can add your tags. But usually these links (especially from Google properties) are outside the reach of marketers because they’re worried about skeevy marketers injecting sneaky redirects and whatnot.

      And I like your idea of tracking the video ID in the content param if you can match it with something that’s more intuitive, like the video title and/or URL using VLOOKUPs.

      I should jump on the card bandwagon, but there are only so many hours in the day ….. 🙂

      Reply
      • Alex Wright says

        September 23, 2016 at 4:09 PM

        Hi Annie –

        YouTube definitely lets you edit the exact content of the URLs in the cards with the caveat that you can only link to one root domain that has been “approved” via a DNS based TXT record to establish that you own the domain. So, yes, you can add any kind of URL you’d like as long as its root is that approved domain.

        The idea of using the Video ID in the content param is based on the fact that that’s the one thing in the video that never changes. The title and everything else can change but that always stays the same.

        What do you suggest as listing for the Source – youtube.com even though many of the clicks will be coming from within the App (which isn’t technically youtube.com)?

        Is there a way you’d recommend to differentiate traffic coming from the YouTube App versus the youtube.com website? This would be amazing knowledge to have, as YouTube analytics doesn’t provided it.

        You should most definitely get on using cards / annotations. Hit me up if you ever want a hand. I can show you what I’ve found works the best.

        Thanks,

        -Alex

        Reply
  91. Mike B says

    December 6, 2016 at 2:46 AM

    WOW! Massive post…I just came across your site and have cleared my schedule =) Tons of great info here…thanks!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      December 6, 2016 at 12:47 PM

      Always music to my ears! 🙂

      Reply
  92. Jeenfer Wilson says

    December 8, 2016 at 12:40 AM

    Nice and detailed post. We have created a Google spreadsheet to create, manage, shorten and save campaign URLs. With this spreadsheet you can

    -Create fully tagged campaign URLs -Shorten the URLs using Bit.ly and TinyURL
    -Keep track of all campaign and short URLs created
    -Share your short links to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest with a single click!
    -Track number of clicks on your short links

    download your copy here http://linkd.me/utm-campaign-builder-spreadsheet.html

    Reply
    • Jeenfer Wilson says

      December 8, 2016 at 12:41 AM

      Sorry. Wanted to post the direct link. Here is the direct link to the spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kV-xMYzJ5G5LQiu3CY1G7pRtOLukdKWV1ntuZ2FPoRw/edit?usp=drive_web

      Reply
      • Annie Cushing says

        December 8, 2016 at 12:01 PM

        Very cool, thanks!

        Reply
  93. Chavdar Superbsys says

    December 29, 2016 at 2:29 PM

    Hey Annie, that’s a super awesome mega post with so mush valuable actionable info. Do you have a recommendation for specific tag for use with adroll campaigns? Thanks you so much.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      December 30, 2016 at 8:09 AM

      Thanks, Chavdar! I actually recommend using a custom medium of ‘retargeting’ and then creating a custom Retargeting channel with that medium. I wrote a channels guide that should help you set that up: https://www.annielytics.com/guides/definitive-guide-to-channel-groupings-google-analytics/. And I’m happy to look it over when you do to make sure you don’t mess up your reporting. You can email me at annie@annielytics.com.

      Reply
  94. Chris McCreery says

    January 17, 2017 at 10:52 AM

    RE: Wistia’s Cool Fresh URL Tool
    You mention that you might possible share the tagged urls cross channel. But in that case wouldn’t you want to know that the link you shared via email brought you the credit for that visit?

    Thanks,

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      January 17, 2017 at 5:05 PM

      Hi Chris,

      No, if a tagged link is shared in another channel, it will reflect the original channel in your GA reports.

      Ex: If I tag a link in an email http://www.annielytics.com/landing-page/utm_medium=email&utm_source=mailchimp&utm_campaign=my+campaign, and someone shares that tagged link in Twitter, those visits will show up in my Email channel, not my Social channel. It’s an occupational hazard. You could use GTM to do some sophisticated referral rewriting, but there’s no simple way to get proper attribution for cross-channel sharing.

      Reply
      • Chris McCreery says

        February 3, 2017 at 1:16 PM

        I understand that, but then the credit should still go to Email as that was where it originated, correct?

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          February 3, 2017 at 1:55 PM

          In a perfect world, conversions from a post shared on social media should be credited to social media, not to email.

          Reply
          • Chris McCreery says

            February 6, 2017 at 4:40 PM

            Ok I see. Thanks Annie! So do you have clients using the Wistia Fresh URL tool? Any caveats or issues you’ve seen?

            Thanks, you’re the best!

          • Annie Cushing says

            February 6, 2017 at 9:08 PM

            Not that I know of.

  95. Eileen Nolan says

    February 2, 2017 at 8:26 PM

    Annie – Your site is such a wonderful resource – thank you.

    My question is related to employee advocacy. How would you suggest we code URLs that we share with our employees and which they then share via their personal social media channels or via email to their clients? For example, if you encourage your employee to share this page and provided them with a pre-written tweet to use on Twitter, how would you code that? Ideally we’d like to be able to see how this type of social media traffic compares to the social media traffic resulting from posts published on Twitter by the company/brand.

    Thanks so much for your assistance!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      February 3, 2017 at 2:06 PM

      Thank you for the kind words, Eileen! I would use the utm_content parameter to add extra details, such as employee IDs. It’s a great wildcard parameter to use for purposes such as this.

      Reply
      • Eileen Nolan says

        February 3, 2017 at 4:35 PM

        Thanks so much!

        Reply
  96. Dmitry says

    February 9, 2017 at 8:26 AM

    Hi Annie
    Great post. I found your blog in Google. It’s been super helpful. We are trying to set up our clients website tagging but want to make sure it’s done correctly.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      February 9, 2017 at 8:56 AM

      Happy to help!

      Reply
  97. Ed Brancheau says

    February 17, 2017 at 8:16 PM

    Holy shimolie Annie! I ended up here because I was simply searching for a way to use Excel more effectively with Analytics and I’m blown away. I only read the stuff about Excel but I’m going to return to read the rest.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      February 18, 2017 at 7:53 PM

      Excellent! I’m delighted it helps!

      Reply
  98. Robert Sallins says

    March 1, 2017 at 4:15 AM

    This guidelines is very interesting and helpful for all peoples So i have to say that for the last few of hours i have been hooked by the impressive articles on this website. Keep up the wonderful work.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 2, 2017 at 11:05 PM

      Thank you!

      Reply
  99. Rainer says

    March 7, 2017 at 10:50 AM

    Great post, thx!

    What about the idea to give the CAMPAIGN NAME a running number (within the organisation), to match this number with anything explaining >> 1000 = Retargeting Membership Google Networks. That keeps the URL shorter and competition cannot fully understand the campaign goals.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      March 9, 2017 at 4:29 AM

      If that works for your organization. Just keep in mind you run the risk of people downstream just not knowing what the data means.

      Reply
  100. Huihsing Kiang says

    June 7, 2017 at 7:24 PM

    Hi Annie,

    Thanks a lot for the great posting. I’m sharing this with the colleagues in my company to encourage them to tag the UTM consistently. Your post is very helpful to standardize our tracking method.

    However, I ran into a huge issue lately and can’t figure out what happened. The campaign info just got missing in my campaign report. Instead, the content is showing up as campaign name.

    Here is the sample tracking code we’re using. And it looks right to me.
    ?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-06-fx-outlook&utm_content=ctatxt

    End up “ctatxt” shows up in my campaign report in GA – “Acquisition” > “Campaigns” > “All Campaigns”. Any insight will be greatly appreciated!!

    Thanks so much!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      June 9, 2017 at 1:34 PM

      That’s where they should show up. The better way to track this campaign is to go to your Channels report (Acquisition > All Traffic) and drill down on the Email channel. The Campaign report is a train wreck.

      Reply
  101. Huihsing Kiang says

    June 23, 2017 at 5:12 PM

    Thank you.

    Reply
  102. Luke says

    November 3, 2017 at 10:12 AM

    Excellent write-up, thanks a lot!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      November 3, 2017 at 12:05 PM

      My pleasure!

      Reply
  103. Darby Jones says

    December 7, 2017 at 12:56 PM

    Annie, excellent piece. Regarding the golden rule of campaign tagging: We found that about 50% of our tagged URL’s are coming from other sites. You mentioned filtering them out, but with the large volume, it get’s to be too cumbersome. One colleague suggested that we put a unique 3-character prefix before all of our source tags so that we can easily filter. Is that a good idea?

    Or you said you could, “redefine them in your Default Channel Grouping (which was covered in the Fixing Default Channel Grouping section of the guide).”

    Which route would you recommend that we take? Thanks!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      December 7, 2017 at 9:09 PM

      Hi Darby,

      I definitely wouldn’t prepend your sources. You want them to align with other sources in the Referral report (e.g., utm_source=facebook.com b/c that’s how it shows up in the Referral report). But you could create a custom channel for these tagged links so that you know to discount them. I just wrote a post on how/why to create these custom channels w/ examples of some of my own: https://www.annielytics.com/blog/analytics/why-you-want-customize-google-analytics-channels-and-how/.

      Reply
  104. Kevin says

    December 9, 2017 at 8:54 AM

    Thanks, this has been really helpful. One thing I’m wondering about the referrals section is…

    If articles on my main site send traffic to sales pages on a subdomain (for our academy site), can I track goal conversions down to the specific article that visitor came from on the main site, using the referrals section of GA? Or, do I have to install some complicated cross-domain tracking stuff?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      December 12, 2017 at 4:13 PM

      Okay, so you’re a little tangled up in this. I’m going to break down a few key facts that build up to the answer to your question:

      1) GA automatically tracks traffic across subdomains, so no need to set up x-domain tracking.

      2) You can see the subdomains in your GA view by going to Audience > Technology > Network > change primary dimension to Hostname.

      3) You can track the articles that drove conversions by looking at your Landing Pages report (Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages), not referrals.

      4) You can track individual subdomains in different properties, but this will treat your individual subdomains as different sites, essentially. This means a new session will be triggered every time a visitor moves from one subdomain to another. So if a visitor can move between subdomains in a single session this approach is ill advised.

      Hope this helps!

      Reply
  105. Darby Jones says

    December 13, 2017 at 5:39 PM

    We have several BU’s and multiple social profiles for each BU. I’m wondering where to put BU’s. Should they go in source, campaign or content?
    Examples:

    1. Promoting Imagine No Malaria (INM) BU on that BU’s FB page. We have other FB pages, so how should we differentiate? Should it be
    med = paid+social
    source = inm+facebook.com
    campaign = 2017+calendars
    or
    source = facebook.com
    campaign = inm+2017+calendars
    or put “INM” in content?

    Another example: A twice-monthly UMCom (BU) newsletter called MyCom:
    med = email
    source = marketo
    campaign = 2017-12-13+umcom+mycom
    or campaign = 2017-12-13+mycom
    content = umcom
    Or do we even need the BU since we already know that mycom is in the umcom BU? Wdyt?

    Btw, with your great advice, I created our own utm tool that forces lower case, forces +’s if users forget, and forces consistency with data validation. I’m usually anti-force but this is a beautiful thing 🙂 Thanks so much!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      December 13, 2017 at 5:43 PM

      Happy to help! If I were creating the tagging matrix, I would drop the BU into the utm_content parameter. So much cleaner. Definitely not the source though. You want your sources to blend (ergo, domain only).

      Reply
      • Darby Jones says

        December 14, 2017 at 4:40 PM

        You recommend putting the name of the newsletter in the campaign tag, but what If you promote 3 campaigns in 1 newsletter. Would you do:
        campaign: 12-14+mycom+campaign1
        or
        campaign: 12-14+mycom
        content: campaign1

        Also, a colleague said we probably won’t be using channel reports in GA because we’ll be using Google Data Studio more. But since GA does not have a default channel dimension available, you have to recreate the conditions with filtering in GDS. And the regex for that is a bit too complex, at least for now. Until GA provides this dimension, isn’t best to rely on GA channel reporting?

        Do you dabble with GDS much and recreate channel reporting?

        And sorry if I’ve asked too much of you, but maybe others have the same questions. Hopefully, it’s helpful. Ok, I’m cut off after this one … er three =\

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          December 15, 2017 at 10:21 AM

          Hi penpal! 😂

          No, seriously … ask away! Answering questions on my posts is usually the highlight of my day.

          1) I would always put the actual campaign name in the campaign parameter and put extra stuff (like date, link type, link placement, banner size, etc) in the content parameter.

          2) You ABSOLUTELY want to still customize your DCG in GA. It is available via the Core Reporting API, which means you can easily bring your clean channels into Data Studio (or any other dashboard tool that access the GA API). That would be much cleaner than trying to recreate the wheel (DCG) in Data Studio. And then they are available to you in GA for ad hoc analysis. Most reports will allow you to segment by channel, as will advanced segments. It’s, hands down, my fave dimension in GA, so I want to make sure it’s runway ready for all purposes.

          Reply
  106. Eric Potratz says

    January 10, 2018 at 2:59 PM

    Hey Annie, like you pointed out, using utm parameters prevents any “Referral Path” or “Full Referrer” from coming into GA, but I did find this:
    https://www.simoahava.com/gtm-tips/check-referrer-for-previous-page-url/

    I’m assuming this {{referrer}} feature would allow the entire referrer or referrer path to come in again, but I haven’t tested it yet. I do believe that editorial links should be tagged with the source, medium, and campaign of a marketer’s choosing.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      January 10, 2018 at 3:16 PM

      We will have to agree to disagree on the practice of tagging editorial links. Editorial links aren’t campaigns; they are persistent links. They should be classified using custom channels, not campaign tags.

      Reply
      • Eric Potratz says

        January 11, 2018 at 5:14 PM

        Hey Annie,

        I think we could agree that campaigns could have “persistent” links as well, so that must not be your only criteria on deciding what links get utm tags. After all, a “campaign” is just an action towards a goal.

        Just to make sure I’m not missing something here…

        We have editorials by sentiment (e.g., humor, argument, tribute, etc), editorials as “paid” (advertorial) or “earned” (organic), editorial by content structure (e.g., current events, review articles, curated content, etc.), editorial by publishing medium (blog, newspaper, forum post, email, etc.) — and so the strict definition of “editorial” becomes blurry. So how do you determine which content should get utm tags, and which should not?

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          January 11, 2018 at 5:51 PM

          The only editorial I would tag would be advertorials. If you want to tag editorial, knock yourself out. I’d just rather have the full referral URL. Ymmv.

          Reply
  107. Anna-Lena says

    February 19, 2018 at 8:54 AM

    Hi Annie,
    absolutely helpful post, I was searching the whole day to find a good explanation.
    However, I am still struggling a bit.
    We sponsor the (weekly) email newsletter of a magazine and have 2 banners, on at the top, and one at the bottom with different sales messages. In order to track which works best, I wanted to create campaigns. We might sponsor it again later this year and it would be good to compare results to this first one.
    I thought of the following:
    medium: email
    source: name of magazine
    campaign name: 2018+newsletter
    content: top+banner (respectively bottom+banner)

    Is this a good solution? I feel I should somewhere add the months, in order to compare results with a newsletter in summer.
    Thanks in advance for your help and thanks again for the many tips and templates!!
    Cheers from Germany.

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      February 19, 2018 at 10:13 AM

      Yes, I think that’s a stellar approach. The only thing I would suggest – if you know you might add to the to campaign name (e.g., month), you might want to put ‘newsletter’ first. I’m always thinking about being able to find and sort easily when I export the report. Using ‘newsletter+2018-01’ would make that super easy. But you’re on the right track!

      Reply
  108. Taylor Johnson says

    September 10, 2018 at 1:37 PM

    Yes, GA does automatically track across subdomains, but we recently found out that serpbook doesn’t lol. If we are using subdomains with that tool it doesn’t track accurately, luckly GA has it figured out haha.

    Reply
  109. Emily says

    October 8, 2018 at 8:07 AM

    Hi Annie,

    This article has been incredibly useful, thanks! Just getting my head around GA to try & tidy up how we track audiences on our website.

    I can see our main issue has been false tagging (i.e. medium=Twitterpost source =Twitter) moving forward I will advise for us to follow your best practice to clean up how our source traffic is displayed

    As a result of the above all of our utm tagged social links have been plonked under ‘other.’ I’ve manually altered the channel grouping so that the social category now pulls in our utm links, however they show as ‘not set’ under Social Network rather than under Linkedin, Twitter etc. (I can add the secondary dimension source/medium to dig out the networks) Is there a way I can manually fix it so the utm links are pulled under the correct social network definitions, whilst we get up to speed with optimising our tagging?

    Thanks in advance!
    Emily

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      October 9, 2018 at 12:54 PM

      Hi Emily!

      You’ll need to set medium to ‘social’ (or one of the mediums under Social Description here: http://bit.ly/ga-channel-definitions) and source to a referral Google recognizes in order for them to populate to the appropriate social network. You can see in this screenshot that my tagged links show up in the appropriate social networks (as evidenced by the presence of a campaign value): https://www.screencast.com/t/Lf59ebhK.

      Reply
  110. Matt Carvosso says

    October 12, 2018 at 10:12 AM

    Hi Annie, thanks for this! Quick question. What is the right way to tag redirects? I’ve currently been doing it this way – https://ensemble.cms.vt.edu/help/how-to/hdid-redirect-tracking.html

    I would imagine you have a different way to do it? Sometimes these redirects come via Banner Ads, sometimes from magazines Ads.

    Please help.

    Thanks in advance.

    Matt

    Reply
    • Matt Carvosso says

      October 17, 2018 at 7:34 AM

      Or anyone else that might be able to help. Thanks. Matt

      Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      October 17, 2018 at 10:42 AM

      Hi Matt,

      I need a little more info. What URL is this link being redirected from? Is it a vanity URL? If you’re redirecting from one page on the site to another page on the same domain, you don’t want to use campaign parameters b/c it will rewrite the session data. (IOW, instead of a visitor coming from facebook.com/social she’ll come from whatever source/medium you assign in your campaign tags.) But if you’re redirecting from another domain – like ESPN does with es.pn (which redirects to espn.com) – you may want to bake utm parameters into the redirect. For ex, if you had a dedicated vanity URL that you only used on billboards (b/c you’re genius), you might want to have it redirect to mysite.com?utm_medium=billboard&utm_source=i95&utm_campaign=back2school.

      Reply
      • Matt Carvosso says

        October 18, 2018 at 7:01 AM

        Hi Annie, thanks for getting back to me, I really appreciate it. It’s a vanity URL (on the same domain). I’m wanting to track how many people come to a page for example https://www.maf-uk.org/story/a-little-girl-gets-new-feet but used the vanity URL http://www.maf-uk.org/imanya to get there. We are using that URL in a physical Magazine Advert. Just wondering what is the best way to track how many people are coming to the page via the redirect http://www.maf-uk.org/imanya – It’s not a social media related.

        Hope that’s enough info.

        Thanks again.

        Matt

        Reply
        • Annie Cushing says

          October 18, 2018 at 6:45 PM

          Hi Matt,

          You would want your vanity URL to redirect to a tagged page. If you’re only using it in a magazine, I would set medium to ‘magazine’ and source to the title of the magazine, e.g., http://www.maf-uk.org/imanya would redirect to https://www.maf-uk.org/story/a-little-girl-gets-new-feet?utm_medium=magazine&utm_source=%5Bmagazine+title%5D&utm_campaign=%5Badvertising+campaign+name%5D. You wouldn’t include the square brackets. They just indicate a generic tag.

          Of course, it’s up to you what medium you’d want to use. Either way, you’d need to create a custom channel for it. I’ve written a channels guide (https://www.annielytics.com/guides/definitive-guide-to-channel-groupings-google-analytics/) as well as this post: https://www.annielytics.com/blog/analytics/why-you-want-customize-google-analytics-channels-and-how/.

          Reply
          • Matt Carvosso says

            October 30, 2018 at 9:53 AM

            Oh thanks so much for you help with this Annie, I really appreciate it! All the best.

  111. Hannah Watkins says

    November 2, 2018 at 1:40 PM

    Hi Annie!

    I am a total fangirl of yours. Love your content. We have been testing out using + marks in our campaign tags but they appear as plus signs in our reports rather than being translated into a space? Do you know if that is something that has changed?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      November 2, 2018 at 2:34 PM

      Thank you for the kind words, Hannah! ☺️ Are you using Google’s URL shortener per chance? With theirs, you can just use a space. Other tools might have already encrypted spaces into their interfaces. You can run a quick testing using GA’s Real Time reports (my post: http://bit.ly/2P5u3IR).

      Reply
  112. Roman Grunis says

    February 18, 2019 at 5:00 PM

    Amazing article,
    I’m sorry I only found it now but great writing is great writing

    Ill def. share this piece with my network

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      February 18, 2019 at 5:04 PM

      Fantastic, Roman. I’m glad it helped you!

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

CAN I HELP YOU FIND SOMETHING?

STUFF I BLOG ABOUT

LEARN HOW TO USE ALL THE TOOLS

marketing strategy guide

DIY marketing strategy guide. This guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to perform 66 unique marketing tasks using 15 reputable marketing tools (both free and paid). Steal it for $295! Learn more.

LEARN TO DO A SITE AUDIT

site audit template

DIY site audit template. 20 sections, 215 checkpoints, 100+ explainer graphics, 218 pages, step-by-step instructions. Steal it for $295! Learn more.

LEARN TO DO AN ANALYTICS AUDIT

analytics audit template

DIY analytics audit template. 8 sections, 61 checkpoints, 100+ explainer graphics, 205 pages, step-by-step instructions. Steal it for $295! Learn more.

TO THIS DATA I DO THEE WED

dashboard course

Learn to build dynamic dashboards in Excel with Google Analytics data. 16 hours of video, 3 sample dashboards, 142-page workbook, practice Excel file, and more! Learn more.

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER

SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL

Privacy Policy
  • Email
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

© 2019 annielytics.com