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.
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.
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:
- Campaign tagging consolidates all campaign data in a set of campaign reports (found under Acquisition > Campaigns).
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
Cast Of Characters
MVP Parameters
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
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
- feed
- banner
- cpc
- display
- affiliate
- ebook
- tv
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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:
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.)
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.
**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 $8 in assisted conversions. By adding MCF reporting to their monthly reports, I made their PPC vendor look like heroes, unbeknownst to them. And this was before Google upgraded the lookback window to 90 days instead of the initial 30 days we had.
Important Note: At the time of writing (3/31/14), the lookback window for the Multi-Channel Funnels API still only gives us 30 days. It hasn’t been upgraded to 90 days yet. 🙁 This is important because if you set the lookback window to 90 days in the interface, your data will not align with the data you get from the API.
These reports can’t be fixed by fixing the Default Channel Grouping inside of Google Analytics, unfortunately. This includes the Attribution models under Conversions > Attribution. You have to use custom channel groupings to apply customized channels to these reports. But at the time of writing custom channel groupings aren’t available in the API. Unless you’re using an API tool like Tableau or Analytics Canvas that allows you to clean up your data, your only option is to fix your reports by fixing your tags or inside Excel, as I demonstrate in the Excel Fix section of the guide.
To learn more about MCF reports, check out Google’s resource on it. My friend, Yehoshua Coren, also wrote a great post on Multi-Channel Funnels.
Google’s Classification Rules
If you want to see the rules Google uses to classify visits, there’s a backdoor in. Follow these steps:
- Go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions.
- Under Primary Dimension, click Channel Groupings, and choose Copy MCF Channel Grouping Template from the drop-down. (We’re not actually going to copy them.
- In the Channel Grouping Settings dialog, click on any of the pencil icons to edit a definition.
- To check out Google’s definition of Social Network, click the pencil icon. Here’s what you’ll see:
Here’s the regex Google uses to help classify social traffic:
^(social|social-network|social-media|sm|social network|social media)$
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
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
Let me know if you find examples of other tools mis-tagging social links in the comments below.
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:
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.
Worst Tagging Mistakes I See
Although most of these mistakes have been covered elsewhere, I’m going to compile them into one place.
- 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.
- Not making the medium “bucket” big enough — or tagging medium as sources like twitter or facebook.
- 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.
- Missing links in boilerplate sections of your emails, such as the header and footer.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Tagging links to someone else’s site. Remember: just tag links to your site.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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}
Thanks, Yehoshua! I added this tip to the guide.
Nice one Yehoshua. Wouldn’t expect anything less from you.
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.
@disqus_MestERNDXp:disqus non-encoded. Don’t use the URL Builder, build out your tags using the spreadsheet that Annie links to above.
@yehoshuacoren:disqus, Thanks!
It seems that GA has switched away from using the plus-sign (+) for spaces and is now using %20s.
No. Plus signs just get encoded as %20s, which then translate into spaces.
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.
+ 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.
+ 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?
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.
Annie, Annie, Annie… That is all I have to say 🙂
That’s all you have to say. 🙂
Thanks Annie! I love campaign tagging, but can see ways to use it better now.
Happy to hear that, Ayelet!
seriously the BEST guide…possibly ever…on this misunderstood topic! Bravo!
Thanks! I’ve been wanting to write it for a long time.
I’m too old to say this, but, OMG – this is exactly the guide we needed, today.
Thank you!
#kismet 🙂
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.
Haha! See? You’re getting it already!
What a great post – I thought I knew everything there was to know about campaign tagging, but obviously not. Thanks for sharing it!
You’re welcome!
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.
I live and die by Evernote!
Now, that is serious! 😉
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!
Excellent Hashim! I hope to meet you at this year’s MozCon!
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?
What are you seeing as (not set)? You can send screenshots to annie(at)annielytics.com, if you want me to take a look.
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.
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.
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.
Annie you are the Best! Huge Thank You!
Always a pleasure, Ben! 🙂
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#
Thanks, Benjamin!
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!
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.
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
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.
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 !
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.
Awesome
Thanks!
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
What page was the tagged URL on?
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? 😉
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!
Thanks, Tom! Glad you like it!
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?
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.
Sure, that makes sense. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. Sometimes GA feels like a maze.
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.
Thanks, Heather! I’m glad it resonated with you. That was definitely my goal. 🙂
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?
You wouldn’t need three different vanity URLs. All you’d need to do is update the source for each.
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.
Very good point. I clearly put inadequate thought into my response. You would need a vanity URL for each university.
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.
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!
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
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!
Thanks, Raymond! I’m delighted it helped!
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!
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.
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?
No, it won’t. You have to include those.
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!
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.
It looks like these direct links from social media sites now come in as medium=Social
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
Wow, Annie. What an incredible resource! Thanks for putting this together. Just stumbled upon it randomly and glad I did.
Thank you! Glad it helps!
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!
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!
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.
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.
At least they fixed their mistakes. There are other social tools that haven’t.
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.
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.
Should the Social : Network Referrals report include tagged links also? As I said, the report includes some but not all links.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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
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!
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.
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?
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?
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.
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!
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!
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
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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
Many who aren’t using the utm_medium=socialflow 🙂
Good! I hope you can get the word out to other users to help them avoid this mistake. 🙂
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.
Exactly Right!
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 🙂
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.
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.
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.
For a display ad in an email, would you tag the channel for that as email or display? Thanks.
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.
Thanks Annie! I love campaign tagging, but can see ways to use it better now.
Fantastic!
Fantastic, Emran! Then my job here is done. 🙂
Thanks, Annie! What an amazingly helpful step-by-step description of how to properly tag my campaigns!
You’re welcome! 🙂
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?
It is possible, but I’d take advantage of AdWords’ auto tagging capabilities. It will be less work for you.
Hi
Can I use tagging for email links (a href=”mailto=test@yahoo.com”) or is it only applicable to url link?
Cheers
Laurent
Only URLs.
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!
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.
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
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?
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 ?
I think Excellent Analytics broke when Google moved to Oauth2 login. :/
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
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.
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”?
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.
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!
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.
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!
Yes, that’s exactly what I’d recommend! And glad you like the guide. 🙂
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.
My pleasure! And best of luck with that store! 🙂
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)?
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.
*medium “referral”, source“reddit.com”…
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.
Thanks for replying, Annie. So utm_medium and utm_source are required parameters?
Yes, that’s correct.
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”?
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.
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?
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. 🙂
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!
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!
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.
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).
This is a great post, thanks for sharing!
My pleasure!
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?
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.
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 🙂
I’m so glad it helped in some small way, Caroline!
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 (&).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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. 🙂
Happy to help!
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.
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.
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!
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.
Hi and thank you for the work !
What about using terms for ad set targeting with facebook ads ?
Cheers
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.
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 🙂
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!
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?
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/.
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!.
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.
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!
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. 🙂
Perfecto! Adding that ~ fixed it. Thanks!
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.
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,
Very cool! I’ll have to try it out. Thanks!
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
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!
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!
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!
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!
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!
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
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!
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
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.
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?
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.
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. 🙁
Good to know! So frustrating.
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!
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.
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!
Yeah, it was so cool of them to create that for the marketing community!
Your blog is very nice and I like it your blog keep sharing with your new article….
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.
Awesome! Glad it helps!
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
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/.
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! 🙂
Those most likely come from people who didn’t accept the default setting of secure.
You mentioned to add “.com” to the source but you never actually said why. What are the drawbacks to not tagging using “.com”?
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.
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!
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).
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. 🙂
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!
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 🙁
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/.
That makes more sense. Thanks for the tip!
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.
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!
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
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
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
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 ….. 🙂
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
WOW! Massive post…I just came across your site and have cleared my schedule =) Tons of great info here…thanks!
Always music to my ears! 🙂
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
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
Very cool, thanks!
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.
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.
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,
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.
I understand that, but then the credit should still go to Email as that was where it originated, correct?
In a perfect world, conversions from a post shared on social media should be credited to social media, not to email.
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!
Not that I know of.
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!
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.
Thanks so much!
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.
Happy to help!
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.
Excellent! I’m delighted it helps!
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.
Thank you!
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.
If that works for your organization. Just keep in mind you run the risk of people downstream just not knowing what the data means.
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!
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.
Thank you.
Excellent write-up, thanks a lot!
My pleasure!
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!
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/.
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?
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!
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!
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).
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 =\
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!