Two Ways to Track Online Marketing Campaigns in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is pretty comprehensive, and all that data can be overwhelming. The key is to measure what matters - metrics that align with your online marketing goals. From tracking email links to web form conversions, Google has you covered in these two areas, and that's the focus of this blog post.

Setting up and Tracking Goals in Google Analytics

For B2B marketers, Goals are a way to track web form conversions (completions) or other visitor actions on your website. For B2C marketers, Goals can bring you closer to realizing revenue goals for particular products. Goals can be set up in the Admin menu in a few steps as shown below. You must be an administrator of your Google Analytics account to set up Goals, and a total of 20 Goals can be set up per company profile. 

Goal set-up Tab
 

Currently, our clients are using Goals to track specific calls to action on their websites including white paper downloads, quote requests, landing page forms, and e-commerce transactions. Goal tracking data is located in the Standard Reporting section of Google Analytics as shown below. 

 

Track Goals in Conversions Tab

 

Why Use Goals?

Goals automatically appear in Google Analytics and provide efficient reporting. You're also able to track the performance of calls to action on your website and adjust them if necessary. Goals associated with Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns or e-commerce transactions provide more insight into which PPC ads and keywords generated the most traffic and e-commerce revenue for particular products and services, respectively.

Using Google's URL Builder to Track Email Marketing Campaigns

Another useful tool is Google's URL Builder. The URL Builder can be used to track email campaign links to your website and is a convenient way to track visitor behaviors linked to particular email campaigns. The URL builder can also be used for other online marketing campaigns including PPC Ads,
e-commerce transactions or any other web action you would like to link back to a particular campaign.

Creating a URL can be done in three steps as shown below. A sample URL would look like this. You would place this link within your email campaign, and more than one URL can be created. Google tracks them all.

Sample URL: http://www.ten24web.com/?utm_source=blogpost&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=LatestBlogPost
 

Google's URL Builder
 

Once the URL is created it is then used in email links to track web actions. You can track the URLs under Traffic Sources (Campaigns). Benchmarking this information over time will help you learn which email campaigns drove the most web actions and what else visitors did on the website. For example,  which pages were visited and whether or not there were conversions (web form completions) based on particular campaigns.

 

Tracking URL links in Campaigns

 

These two tools are a great starting point; especially for companies that can't afford automated, often expensive marketing automation tools. We often recommend and set up these tools for our clients. 

Are you using these tools for your online marketing campaigns? You should be. They are free and require minimal effort to set up, but if you need a little help you know where to find it.