Why Is URL Tagging Important & How Do I Do It?

Here at Blue Corona, we live and breathe one phrase: “Track > Test > Tweak > Repeat.”

Our clients probably get sick of us telling them to track everything, but they know it’s for a good reason. Tracking helps you market efficiently. If you can review visit and lead data from each of your marketing sources, you will know where to invest your money to generate more sales.

One of the easiest ways to track your return on marketing investment is through URL tagging. URL tagging works with your Google Analytics account to report on visit and lead metrics for each of your marketing sources.

How Do I Tag URLs?

Let’s say you have an HVAC company and your website is: www.baileyswebsite.com. This spring, you are sending out an email newsletter with an AC installation special. You want to know how many sales came from this email newsletter. After all, you spent time and money creating and sending it!

Step One: Go to the Google URL Builder.

Step Two: Plug in the source, medium, and name for the marketing campaign you want to track. You can also plug in more optional identifiers like term and content.

Confused about what a source or medium is? These terms refer to dimensions in Google Analytics:

• Source = what is referring the traffic to your website? Google? A newsletter? Keeping the source name consistent amongst marketing strategies will allow for easier reporting. If you have more than one person working on your marketing, we recommend keeping a spreadsheet of your URL naming conventions for better consistency.
• Medium = what type of referral is it? Email? CPC?
• Campaign Name = if you have more than one campaign of the same source and medium, this will help differentiate those campaigns. For example, many of our clients do seasonal campaigns and will label their campaign names by season.

Step Three: Once you have plugged in all of your differentiators, all you have to do is hit “submit.” The Google URL builder will provide you with a URL specifically meant for your spring email newsletter.

Step Four: When you send out your spring newsletter, be sure that the link to your site in the email uses this tagged URL. Google Analytics will be able to report visits, contact form submissions, and other important metrics related to your newsletter.

Step Five (Bonus Step): Take out a tracked phone line. This way, you can also track if your email newsletter (or other strategy) results in any phone leads, in addition to contact form submissions.

Start Tracking Your Marketing Strategies

As we head into the end of the calendar year, it is important to review each of your marketing strategies. Which ones brought in a ton of sales last year? Should you invest more? Which strategies aren’t bringing in any leads? Should you invest less? Once you do this, you can set a marketing plan for the new year.

Here at Blue Corona, we are different than your typical SEO company. We pride ourselves in our tracking tools and want to help you make the best marketing decisions for your company. Contact us today for a consultation.