There are a bazillion new digital advertising products offering a variety of different solutions and it is important for marketers to analyze the traffic. If your media company or digital advertising agency are not implementing tags, red flag. Why? When you tag a URL, your campaign will flag Google Analytics allowing you to judge the quality of traffic being sent your way. It’s possible, your vendor doesn’t want you to know too much.
Google’s UTM Builder
Here are the steps:
- https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
- enter your website URL (i.e., https://www.actuatemedia.com)
- Campaign Source (i.e., email)
- Campaign Medium (i.e., email)
- Campaign Name (i.e., Management_fee_special)
Previously, Campaign Source, Campaign Medium, and Campaign Name were all required to build the URL. Now, it appears only Campaign Source is required.
Live Example URL:
https://www.actuatemedia.com/?utm_source=UTMBuilder&utm_medium=BlogLink
Here is a generic UTM string, which you can simply add on to your URL. Just replace the XXXXX with your content
/?utm_source=XXXXX&utm_medium=XXXXX
Finally, I recommend testing the tag before deploying to ensure it works. To see your tag in Google Analytics you might have to wait until midnight for Analytics to update. Then go to Acquisitions, select All Traffic, then Source/Medium, finally, you may need to scroll a few pages depending on how much traffic your site receives, or you can narrow your dates to view one day. Here is what it will look like:
Tagged URL in Analytics
Actuate Media is a digital marketing agency with offices in Seattle and Tampa. Our team has run hundreds of digital advertising campaigns nationwide including PPC Search Marketing, SEO, Display Advertising, Video Advertising, and more. We are proud to have completed Google Partner’s Specialist Challenge and we are Google Ads & Analytics, certified specialists. Our agency implements a data-driven approach connecting advertising results and analytics, aggregating the data for future analysis allowing our partners to make smart advertising decisions in the future to gain a competitive advantage.
