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Using URL Builder to Improve Analytics Reporting

When using Analytics, Google itself has access to enough information to feed you a lot of data in terms of users’ interactions with your website, as well as where they originated from. However, there are a couple types of marketing efforts efforts that can lead to users accessing your site from sources that Google either can’t identify or can’t segment enough to be useful to you.

The two prominent examples are email marketing campaigns and running multiple ads on a single domain. In the case of email campaigns, google doesn’t have control over your email client, and thus doesn’t know where the email link originated. As a result, without using URL builder, one’s email campaign traffic will likely end up showing up under Acquisition Channels as Direct traffic. When running multiple ads on one website– you may have one banner ad, header, footer, plain text, etc.– google will not be able to differentiate which traffic came from which ad, preventing you from assessing their performance and adjusting accordingly.

In these cases, Google offers a simple tool to feed it the information it needs in order to give you this useful data- URL builder. Using URL builder allows you to create a custom url for your destination page and attribute the desired source information, in turn allowing Google Analytics to better display the exact behavior of users.

 

To access URL Builder click here or search for “URL builder” and ,if you’re logged into analytics, you should see a page like the following:

 

URL builder homepage

 

Taking the example of an email marketing campaign, what you’ll want to do is enter the url of the page that you are linking to in your emails. In this case lets say that I’m sending links to Astral Web’s content page:

 

URL Builder Landing page

I then fill out the boxes as required below:

URL Builder Demonstration image

*when copying and pasting destination URLs, be sure that they do not contain any excess coding or characters- you’ll end up with a non-functional link.

After clicking Submit, we’re given a long link that includes all of the information that has just been entered into URL Builder.

Unique URL from URL builder

This is the link that I’ll want to put into my emails (or ads, etc.) in order to identify them in analytics.

In order to ensure that the link is functional and visible in analytics, paste this link into a separate browser window while you’ve got your viewing your Real Time > Traffic Sources. As you can see below, if the link is functioning properly, you’ll be able to see it almost immediately in Analytics. Furthermore, all the information you’ve input to distinguish the medium, campaign, and target are now identified by Google, and Analytics can give you the kind of information that is really crucial to optimizing your marketing campaigns.

Checking URL builder with Real Time view

If you’d like more information, please check out Ori’s video tutorial on using URL Builder.

 

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Track Email Campaign with Analytics URL Builder

You will always want to evaluate each and every campaign that you run and separate data based on your efforts and different avenues in order to reach conclusions.

Email campaigns are no different. We tyipcally use Analytics URL Paramaters via the Analytics URL Builder Tool to tag our email efforts.

Step 1: Visit Google Analytics URL Builder

Go to https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

Step 2: Enter Info into Form

– Enter Landing Page
– Enter campaign Source
– Enter Medium
– Enter Term
– Enter Content
– Enter Name

Analytics URL Builder Form

Step 3: Copy URL

Copy URL from below form

Copy URL from Form

Step 4: Paste into Email Marketing Campaign as Link

Paste your URL Builder link into your email

Paste Link

Step 5: Test Link and Send out

Step 6: Evaluate Data in Google Analytics

Video Transcription:

Hey everybody. It’s Ori from Astral Web. Just wanted to talk about something that has come up lately with our clients. The issue is tracking email marketing campaigns, newsletters, email reachouts. When you send out emails to your customers, clients, whomever it is, you want to track that your specific emails are getting clicks to your website so you actually know your campaign is doing good. Aside from open rates, you want to know that they’re coming to your website and converted. And if you’re going to include a simple links such as www.example.com, you won’t see where it came from, which newsletter if came from, if it was a direct visit from a yahoo mail, etc. So what you want to do is track what you are doing. Go to google analytics url builder and all you have to do is fill out all fields with asterisk and associate it in your email campaign. You’ll be able to track a lot of information and it’ll give you so much more. I
ll so you how to use it quickly. Type in website url the url. Now the source for email newsletter can be newsletter1. and the medium would be email and campaign terms and content is more for ppc and adwords. Now let’s go to name, emailweekend. And all you do is click on submit and you copy this url and paste it in your email link, not just www.domain.com. On last thing before you move forward is to test url’s in email because some sites do not handle this correctly as they process php for example in a different way. You don’t want your web pages to break. Always test. Hope you enjoyed this video. Thanks!