Last year we gave you some tips on what to measure in our Are Your Marketing Campaigns Successful post, now we want to go a step further and show you a great tool: URL Builder.
Before You Start
First and foremost (and probably easiest), is signing up to Google Analytics. Google Analytics allows you to see your website traffic, and gives you insight into how your customers use your site - an important part of your customer’s journey. Once you have a Google Analytics login, you can now use the free Google URL Builder to help track customers from all your different digital campaigns.
How It Works
Google Analytics is great - it gives you heaps of information about your customers once they are on your website. But how do we get insight into a specific digital marketing campaign? For example, how do we know our Twitter campaign is really driving traffic to the website? URL Builder allows you to do just that, by appending queries to the URL so that Google Analytics knows exactly where the customers have come from. This allows you to gauge what campaigns are working (and converting) customers. When you get to the URL builder it will look something like this:
Scroll down a little to “URL Builder Form” this is the tool itself.
Here, you need to add your URL, along with all the other variables such as Campaign Source, Campaign Medium and Campaign Name. We’ve used an example below to make it easier to understand.
Example
We want to create a campaign on Facebook for one of our blogs. Below is how we would fill out the URL Builder form.
Website URL (the URL that you want to send customers to): https://www.ticketsolve.com/blog/are-your-marketing-campaigns-successful
Campaign Source (the referrer i.e Facebook, Twitter, Mailchimp): Facebook
Campaign Medium (the marketing medium i.e email, banner ad, page): Page
(Campaign Term we are not using as we are not using any paid keywords)
Campaign Content Blog Post Campaign Name (use something that you can identify easily): Marketing Campaigns Blog
Next you need to click the generate URL button, and Google will append all the variables to the URL as shown below: http://www.ticketsolve.com/blog/are-your-marketing-campaigns-successful?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Page&utm_campaign=Marketing%20Campaigns%20Blog
You can go ahead and use a URL shortener if you like (we like https://bitly.com/), as some of the URL’s can be monsters. You can also decide not to show the URL in the Facebook post. When we eventually run this campaign in Facebook, we would use some captivating copy and imagery along with the URL above. When customers click on that URL they will get taken to that specific blog post.
Behind the scenes, Google will have created a campaign within your Google Analytics so that you can track the effectiveness of this specific campaign. To see this information go the the acquisition menu within Google Analytics and click on all campaigns.
As Ticketsolve integrates fully with Google Analytics, not only will you be able to see the number of customers going to your site from the campaign, but also the number of transactions and revenue generated from it. So using the Google URL Builder allows you to simply and effectively track your campaigns to see what is working and what is not.
If you would like to know more about how Ticketsolve can help please get in touch!
