Following are steps and corresponding documentation for setting up Google tracking links for your website. The specific example that we discussed was to set up tracking links from Clear Channel radio station websites, but this method will work for any inbound links where you can provide the custom tracking link to the source – website, email, or anywhere a link can be displayed.

Google Tracking Link Documentation:

How does campaign tracking work?

How do I track my Links?

Understanding campaign variable: The five dimensions of campaign tracking.

Tool: URL Builder.

Back-end Google Tracking Link Setup:

• Go to the Google Tracking Link URL Builder
• Enter the destination URL – for the radio stations we discussed using the splash page (http://www.yourwebsite.com/welcome.html)
• Fill in the five campaign variables (source, medium, term, content, name)
  • The variable “Campaign Name” will be used to group the traffic data together for reporting. So enter a single name for the traffic that you want to group together. For example: if you would like to group all radio station traffic into a single campaign, use something like “Clear Channel Radio” for all links
  • “Campaign Source” could simply be “Clear Channel”
  • “Campaign Medium” could be used to separate different types of source links. For example: if you will have both text links and a banner ads being displayed on their site, you could provide tracking links specifying “text link” or “banner” as the medium.
  • “Campaign Content” will let you differentiate between two different graphical banner ads that you may rotate on the same site. This will allow you to see if the yellow ad with brown text was more effective than the image of the smiling business people . . . for example.
  • “Campaign Term” is something you may or may not want to use. This refers to which term or “keyword” you’re paying to have the ad display for. Your Clear Channel ads are not keyword or term specified.
• Provide special tracking links to the source (Clear Channel).
  • If you’re going to provide multiple links for multiple banners, it can be helpful to do so in a consolidated spreadsheet, with each ad on a single row, with respective info – i.e. | name | link | graphics | description |. It can also be helpful to use a date in the file name so that updated files are easy to identified.

Google Tracking Link Reporting and Analysis:

• Log into you Google Analytics account
• In the left-hand menu, go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns
• In the main body, all traffic sources will be presented.
  • Those that haven’t been set up under a campaign will be presented as (not set) – for now it represents almost all of your site traffic
  • I had set up a test campaign link under the Campaign Name “test promo”
• If you change the “Dimension:” from the dropdown menu in the header row of the table, you can see the various tracking link variables (source, medium, campaign, keyword (term), and content). Under dimension, you can also separate traffic by city, region (state in U.S.) and more.

If you have any questions about the process, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thanks,

Dominic

Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.