Analytics tagging is an important
aspect of tracking your online marketing programs. A standard analytics
tracking implementation generally just tracks page views. In most cases,
this does not give you a complete picture of how your prospects are
interacting with your site. Two advanced tactics that can give you more
detail are Event Tracking and URL Tagging.
EVENT TRACKING
One of the biggest trends
in analytics tagging today is called Event Tracking. These tags enable
you to track specific actions on your site that don't necessarily generate
an actual page view. It's much more detailed information than a standard
analytics setup provides.
Here are some examples of things you
can track with Google Analytics Event Tracking:
- Play/pause a video
- Dragging an element from one part of the screen into
another part of the screen, e.g. dragging a product into a shopping cart
- Selecting a location/pin on a map
- Resizing/panning a map
- Reordering elements in a list
- Hovering over elements on a Web page
URL Tagging
Tagging ads is an important
prerequisite to allowing Google Analytics to show you which marketing activities
are the most cost effective. Fortunately, the tagging process is fairly simply once
you understand how to differentiate your campaigns. This three-step process
should help you get started. (Learn More Here: The five dimensions of
campaign tracking.)
1. Enable Auto Tagging
To avoid having to tag each ad individually, which could be time consuming, you
can choose to select auto-tagging enabled , in your AdWords account. This way you don't need to tag
your AdWords' URLs, it will be done for you. However, all your non-AdWords paid
keyword links, banners and other ads do need to be tagged individually.
2. Use the URL Builder
Make life easier! Use the URL builder to create your links correctly. Just fill
out the URL Builder
form and press the Generate URL button. A tagged link will be generated
for you and you'll be able to copy and paste it to your ad.
3. Only Use the Fields You Need
Even though Google Analytics' offers you six unique fields in the URL Builder
Form you only need to use the ones that contain the best identifier keywords.
In fact, you'll usually only need to use Source, Medium, Name,
and Term(for paid keywords). The table below shows how you might tag
the three most common kinds of online campaigns - banner ads, email campaigns,
and paid keywords.
|
|
Banner Ad
|
E-mail Campaign
|
Pay Per Click Keywords
|
|
Campaign Source
|
Where2getit
|
newsletter1
|
searchlocator
|
|
Campaign Medium
|
banner
|
email
|
cpc
|
|
Campaign Term
|
Anaheim
|
July
|
the keyword you purchased
|
|
Campaign Content
|
|
|
|
|
Campaign Name
|
productxyz
|
productxyz
|
productxyz
|
| | | |
