Jay LeonardA lot of experts who are into pay per click marketing are advising others to do some URL tracking in their PPC. For something that is quite easy to do, the benefits are enormous.
But just what is URL tracking? Why should you do it and most importantly, how do you do it?
What is URL tracking?URL tracking is simply tagging the destination URLs that you use in your PPC campaigns. By tagging, we mean adding unique identifiers that you can then feed to Google Analytics or some other analytics and Web statistics software that you are using.
Why do URL tracking?
One of the dictums of marketing is that each of your activities should show a return on investment for you to know if it is worth the time and money you spend on it. This means that you should keep a separate way of tracking sales from your direct marketing efforts and your Internet marketing efforts. Even within Internet marketing where you may have several activities, you must know whether your PPC campaigns are contributing significantly to your ROI and how it compares to other Internet marketing channels such as social media and e-mail.
URL tracking helps you with keeping your PPC data separate from those who visit your Web site from organic search engine results or those referred to it from your Facebook page. Without URL tracking you would not know where these people came from and your data would be close to useless. For example, if you have top ranking on Google for your Web site and you have a PPC campaign on Google Adwords, without URL tracking to tag your destination URLs, these will be reported by Google Analytics as organic traffic.
There would be no way for you to know if it came from Google search or your PPC efforts.
In short, tagging your URLs would help you know for sure what percentage of traffic are coming from SEO and how many are coming from PPC. This will help you know their respective ROIs.
Another reason for tracking your URLs is that it will give you a better understanding of your PPC campaigns because you have accurate data related only to your PPC campaigns. This will help you know if there are ad groups to improve or if it is time to rewrite the ad copy. It will also help you test different versions of your ad copy and help you know what efforts work with your audience and what you should stop doing.
It is true that you will have data, numbers and statistics such as conversion tracking, impression stats and click-through rates and other information, but these numbers do not give you an idea of just what happens after people click on your link.
Tracking your URL helps you get a better and more complete picture of what happens next by giving you the bounce rate, the new visitors, average time spent on the site, the number of pages viewed on that visit and other helpful statistics.
What are the different ways of URL tagging?
Auto tagging.
Auto tagging allows you to track your URL without doing much of anything. You would need to link your Google Adwords account with your Google Analytics account and turn on the auto-tagging feature to let the system tag your URLs automatically.
Be sure to test your destination URLs, however, to see if it is implemented correctly. You could do this by appending ?gclid=test or &gclid=test at the end of your destination URL and pasting this URL on your browsers bar. If you do not encounter an error, then you are good to go.
Manual tagging.
In Google Analytics you could use the Google Analytics URL Builder to make sure that you are using the proper tags. The free tool is found here: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867&rd=1
You will be asked to enter the Web site URL along with these variables :
- Campaign Source – The referrer such as Google.
- Campaign Medium – The marketing medium you used such as newsletter, emails, PPC, etc.
- Campaign Term – The paid keyword or keywords used.
- Campaign Content – Specific identifiers for that particular ad.
- Campaign Name – Your name for the campaign, such as the product’s name or promo code.
Manual Tagging for Backends.
Manual tagging may also be done using backend systems using ValueTrack parameters. ValueTrack parameters are especially useful if you use other tracking software other than Google Analytics. They can help you come up with dynamic URLs that change depending on the behavior of the users, such as whether or not the visitor clicked on it or what version of the ad was shown or even what keyword was used to trigger the ad. These parameters are enclosed in braces ({}). If one or more variables are used, you connect them with ampersands (&).
Some of the most common ValueTrack parameters are:
{matchtype} – details the triggering keyword’s matching option, whether it’s broad, exact or phrase (appearing as b, e, or p in the final URL)
{ifmobile:[value]} – if your ad is accessed on a mobile phone or tablet, you will see the [value] you specified in the URL.
{creative} – the ad’s specific unique ID
{keyword} – what keyword was used by the searcher to see your ad
{adposition} – the page position where your ad appeared
Other tags are fully explained by Google here: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2375447
Other tips for URL Tracking
You can also use URL tracking when you have other campaigns such as e-mail marketing, banner advertising or Facebook ads. Just put the marketing campaign as the utm_source= section of your URL.
You can also use your ad groups for the utm_source= section; this will help you see how a particular ad group is performing easily.
Monitor and refine. As you work with URL tracking, you will find that you can use it in other ways that are more intuitive for you and your campaign. You can refine that to structure your campaign so that it provides you with data conveniently.
You will be amazed at the amount of data that you can get from tracking your URL. This can provide you with better insights when it comes to making decisions in improving your campaign, like lowering bounce rates and increasing time on site. You can always use this data in conjunction with other conversion data and goals, as well.
This post is brought to you by Chris Barnwell of SEO Inc.; a locally owned and operated Search Engine Optimization company that provides a range of services such as Organic SEO and PPC Management.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Hi,
If you are a Chrome user, URL tagging can be much easier using the Chrome extension, which saves a lot of time with saving your common tags to “sets” which fills the form in a glance (plus bitly if you want)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gaidpiakchgkapdgbnoglpnbccdepnpk