If you know about and already use the Google URL Builder tool, you can stop reading and move on to the next blog. If you’re still with me, wondering what the heck a URL builder is, then the next 3 minutes belong to you.
One of the major components of digital marketing is measurement and metrics. The best thing about digital marketing is the ability to conduct small, measured experiments that take just a little time, but teach us so much about what will or will not be effective. The experiments usually involve driving traffic to a web property, and behind that web property should always be an analytics tool. The biggest, baddest, and most free is Google Analytics (hereafter referred to as G.A.). G.A. allows you to see, track, and measure every activity on your website, and most importantly who arrived there, how they got there, and where they came from.
That said, many people are only getting the knowledge that comes from seeing that you got X number of visitors from Twitter and Y number of visitors from the email newsletter, etc. What that looks like is you see a bunch of traffic from “t.co” or “email” or “Google organic”. That gives you the knowledge, generally, of where your traffic came from. But you have little or no understanding about how that visitor’s journey took them to your web site.
Here’s a very short exercise to demonstrate what I mean. First, Google “Atlanta Tech Blogs”. Since you’re Googling the name of my website, it’ll come up first on the search engine results page. If you click on the link, you’ll get to http://www.atlantatechblogs.com. Simple, right? No. Not simple. At this point, you have knowledge that you searched for Atlanta Tech Blogs and when you clicked on that link, you got to atlantatechblogs.com.
That’s not good enough to have a deep understanding of your web audience traffic. So go back to that results page, and right click on the link to Atlanta Tech Blogs, then “copy link address.” Then paste what you copied into your browser or even just into notepad or whatever you take notes on. It’ll look something like this:
See all that junk in there? If you look closely, you can find your website’s URL in there. Everything else is what we call “UTM Parameters”, which is a big fancy technical term for “all the other data you need to track this campaign.” And you have the power to track every click from every campaign just like Google does.
-
Website URL (the page you want the visitor to end up on, aka “landing page”)
-
Campaign Source (where is the campaign taking place?)
-
Campaign Medium (what kind of campaign is it?)
-
Campaign Term (Google assumes you’re using Adwords, so they ask for your key word)
-
Campaign Content (Name the content that’s driving the campaign)
- Campaign Name (what are you calling this campaign?)
Here’s the “hard” part. I quoted “hard” because it’s just manual, not hard. When you create one of these long UTM parameter URLs, it’s ugly, long, and you don’t want to paste that into Twitter or any other medium, so you use a URL shortener (Google has one of those, too), or make that the link behind your call to action button.
When visitors click on that link, you have knowledge of where they came from, but more importantly you have understanding of what brought them there. Instead of “t.co” when a visitor arrives from Twitter, you’ll see the entire URL that you created, and now you can track as part of measuring the effectiveness of a campaign. Every campaign. Ideally, every campaign you run has it’s own unique URL with UTM parameters, and perhaps even multiple URLs, if you run a single campaign across multiple digital channels like Twitter and Facebook.
That’s the difference, in digital marketing anyway, of knowledge vs. understanding.
Leave a comment