How to set up web tracking code for Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an excellent, free tool that supports your online lead generation strategy by helping you understand where your website enquiries are coming from and which aspects of your online marketing campaigns drive the traffic to your website. The data recorded is sufficient to empower you to make decisions about which digital channels are working for you.

Before we explore the ins and outs of tagging a link, it’s worth acknowledging the different types of links that you may have pointing towards your website:

1. Links as a result of your advertising efforts – i.e. banners, email campaigns, etc.
2. Links from Pay-Per-Click advertising sources – Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, etc.
3. Links as a result of your profile building – Facebook page, YouTube channel, Twitter account, etc.
4. Links as a result of your link acquisition campaigns (which will help you improve your coverage in organic search)

If you access your Google Analytics account and navigate to Traffic Sources >> All Traffic Sources you will be confronted with a list of traffic sources in the following format:

Within each row the first listing is referred to as the “Source” and the second as the “Medium” – in the first row we have 21,852 visitors from the source “Google” / medium “Organic”. The third row indicates 2,094 visitors from source “Upmystreet.com” / medium “Integrated_Ad” as I have used a special code to distinguish traffic from the Integrated Advert on Upmystreet.com from the Banner Advert on Upmystreet.com. A two-month trial gave me enough data to make the decision to drop the Banner Advert and concentrate my advertising spend on the Integrated Advert.

When Google is unaware of the advertising “medium” it uses “referral” as the default option:

When to use web tracking code?
1. When you have multiple advertising sources on one site
As touched on above with the Upmystreet.com advertising, if you are advertising on two or more channels on the same site you need to treat each advertising venture as a totally different source and to tag it accordingly. Frequently publishers will offer bespoke packages that include banners (horizontal ads at the top of the page), skyscrapers (tall vertical ads), MPUs (square mid-page ads), etc. To empower yourself to make informed judgements on which avenues to continue / discontinue you need to add web tracking code to each link within the campaign (i.e. one uniquely tagged link per banner, button, skyscraper, etc.).

Similarly, sites like Facebook may have multiple channels. You may have a profile building link from your Facebook page but also be running a Facebook PPC campaign. It is not possible to tag the profile building link from the Facebook information page as there is no opportunity to edit the content within the <a href=””> element of the profile page. However you should be tagging any links from PPC campaigns you are running from Facebook (and any links you are posting on your wall) so you can track the effectiveness of these avenues.

2. When you have visitors from the same source across multiple sites
This is often the case with email marketing and RSS feeds. Users are coming to your site from multiple locations – different websites and secure pages on webmail clients like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc. This makes your data difficult to analyze with these types of campaigns as it tends to make a results display that looks like this (numbers equate to number of visits):

By adding tracking code to the links in your email marketing campaigns and RSS feeds you are able to aggregate the data via these sources to get a true picture of the success of these sources. So your data ends up looking like this:

How activate web tracking code?
Google has created a tool that creates a link that looks something like this:

http://twitter.com/?utm_source=stockport-seo.co.uk&utm_medium=banner

Note ?utm_source=stockport-seo.co.uk&utm_medium=banner as in your Analytics report these properties will display as:

By adding different mediums to the links with the paid advertising on a particular site you will be able to view more meaningful traffic source data that looks like this:

By using Google’s URL Builder Tool you will be able track the success of each medium by creating links in the above format.

Please note

• It is not necessary to tag the links in your Google PPC Campaigns if your Google Adwords account is linked to your Google Analytics account
• Google’s URL Builder Tool will also generate a utm_campaign tag which will enable you to assess the success of a Campaign in your Analytics account – go to Traffic Sources >> Campaigns
  • when using this tag I tend to lump activity into very broad categories like “Display”, “Email” or other top level streams
  • alternatively try to link the utm_campaign tag with the Goal Sets you have generated in your Analytics account
  • you may consider synching this with the campaigns in your Google Adwords account so as to get a complete picture of the success of campaigns you are running
• It is possible to take off the &utm_campaign=xxx element of the Google generated link if you want

Frequently Asked Question – will web tracking code affect my position in the search results?
With your Link Acquisition, it will be very difficult to include web tracking code on links from certain sources such as web directories, profile marketing, etc. where the websites in question will only accept top level domain names (i.e. www.stockport-seo.co.uk). With links from blogs, article marketing and linkbait campaigns it is difficult to manipulate the links to include tracking code and as the objective of these types of links is to improve your search ranking, build readership, etc, I am not sure it is worth it.

If you are using tracking code on the advertising leading to your website, I would ensure that your site has a canonical URL meta tag which identifies the actual URL of the webpage. This is easy to add in the <head> area of your page. Your canonical URL should look like this:

<link
rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.stockport-seo.co.uk/how-to-set-up-web-tracking-code/” />

This should avoid any duplicate content issues where Google has to choose which content to index in its database.

About Geoff

I run the digital marketing for the UK division of a global supplementary education provider. To find out what I'm up to join me on Google+