Tech Tuesday: Google Analytics with Short Links to your Social Media tracking rescue!

I am sensing a bit of a pattern here for Tech Tuesday – we’ve talked a lot about analytical tracking and social media. Well,  I don’t see this stoping anytime soon as it is a very popular subject that I get asked about a lot!

Today I am going to show you how to use Google Analytics URL Builder to build tracking URLs, and then using a shortener program like bit.ly to pretty them up.

Using Google Analytics URL Builder adds variables to your URL that sends Google information about where the user is coming from once they land on your page with tracking code on it. This can be very useful on its own, but you can also use it to do more in-depth e-commerce tracking as well through funnels, however that is a topic for another day, we will be sticking to just tracking where your users are coming from.

First, let’s start by building our URL, then head  over to the Google URL Builder and start by filling in the first field, which is the URL you want your user to end up at. Next, you’ll have three required fields:

Campaign Source – This is going to be your identifier for where the user is coming from. For this example, I’m going to put in Twitter as the source.

Campaign Medium – The medium is the action that the user is going to be responding to. In the case of Twitter this could simply be a tweet, however to be really useful and distinguish from your other campaigns, you want to be more specific. Let’s pre-tend we are doing a ticket giveaway for an upcoming conference. I will put in “giveawaytweet”. This lets me know that the user coming to me from Twitter is clicking on my conference giveaway related tweets.

Campaign Name – This is the general name for the campaign. This is the more human readable version of campaign medium. I am going to use Conference Giveaway. This is also going to be what you are looking for in Google Analytics.

Finally click “Generate URL.” You will end up with something like this:

http://stratfordcampus.uwaterloo.ca/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=giveawaytweet&utm_campaign=Conference%2BGiveaway

Now as you can see if this is a twitter campaign that URL is going to take up a lot of space! So we will use a URL shortener.

When picking your URL shortener you should be looking for one that can allow you to do two things. First, it should let you track the click on the link, because you want to know how many people are clicking the link, but possibly not making it to the website. Second, you want to be able to customize the URL. Since this is a campaign you will be using the same URL a lot so cusomizing it make it easier to remember.

I am going to use bit.ly. This requires you to have an account, so if you do not already go ahead and make one. Once you have logged-in, paste your long Google generated URL into the box and click shorten. Press customize beside the URL it gave you, and enter something unique to your campaign. For our example, I’ll  use “giveawaytweet,” which results in:

http://bit.ly/giveawaytweet

And there you have it, you now have a Google tracking enabled short link! Now go ahead and tweet it away. Once you have been runing your campaign for a little bit you can head on over to Google Analytics and track its status!

To track the status, log into Google Analytics and select your website. In the left hand navigation you will go under Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns, then select the name of your campaign to see how many users are hitting your page from that campaign.

With these analytics you can use Google Analytics secondary dimensions to find out more about your users, like demographic information. You can also select these campaign as a dimension when looking at other analytics in your site.

Now if your stats look rather bleak, look at your bit.ly account. You can head over there and see how many users are clicking on the specific link. If they do not add with your Google Analytics (IE. lots of bit.ly clicks but very little showing on Google Analytics) up you know that your users are getting lost somewhere. Either closing the page because they never meant to click your link or your link could be going to the wrong website!

I hope you have enjoyed this week’s post we will see you next week!

One Response to Tech Tuesday: Google Analytics with Short Links to your Social Media tracking rescue!

• Assaf says:

  November 28, 2011 at 10:06 PM

  We’ve just developed a google chrome extension for google url builder that does the same but much faster and without the need to browse for the tool.
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gaidpiakchgkapdgbnoglpnbccdepnpk

  Reply