Custom URL tracking for paid online ads
-
Hello!
Our marketing team is testing paid online ad networks (banner ads, mobile ads and video ads) this year in addition to some traditional television advertising.
We would like to track how effective these various ads are, and I'm wondering the best method to do so. In all cases, we're not setting up new pages for these ads to go to. They will simply go to an existing page on our site. For tracking purposes, here's what I'm wondering... If we set up custom URLs on our site (e.g. www.example.com/sports) then have the visitor immediately redirected to the intended page on our site (typically our home page), will Google Analytics show that custom URL in any report to see how much traffic flowed through it? Or will it not register because a page doesn't really exist for that URL?
The biggest issue is with the banner ad network, which targets around ten categories of sites (sports, moms, entertainment, etc.). I know I'll be able to find the network listed as a referrer to see the total traffic the network sent us, but we would like to know specifically which category drove the visits. As such, would a custom URL for each category work, or will Google Analytics not pick it up because it's not hitting an actual page?
For television ads, we are showing our URL as www.example.com/tv, which would then redirect to the intended landing page. In this case, it's a little more challenging because I won't have the referrer traffic to go by. But same problem... will GA recognize that URL and show it in Behavior > Site Content > All Pages?
I hope this makes sense. If not please let me know and I'll try to explain.
Thanks in advance,
Erik -
Thanks, John. Great information!
Erik
-
Dana is spot on with the Google URL builder. If you're tracking in Google Analytics, this is the way to go. My favorite report for this is the Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths report. Select "Source/Medium" as your primary dimension, and you'll be able to how conversions are going by whatever utm_source and utm_medium parameters you put into your URLs. You can add a secondary dimension of Campaign path to see how things are going by utm_campaign. You can then search by any of those to see when campaigns are driving conversions. I do that all the time.
So for your banner campaign targeting different categories of sites, if they're all with one provider, I'd set a consistent utm_source and utm_medium, and vary the utm_campaign by the different campaigns you mentioned there as examples (sports, moms, entertainment, etc.). If you're doing banners through Adwords, you can turn on "auto-tagging" which will automatically tag your ad URLs for you. See here for more info on that.
The easiest thing to do for TV campaigns is just to have www.example.com/tv redirect to your landing page with the utm parameters on it. For example, have www.example.com/tv redirect to www.example.com/tvlandingpage?utm_source=tv&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=hulu-ad or something along those lines. Since people coming from the TV are not being referred to you by another site, you shouldn't lose any referral data with the redirect.
-
Thanks Dana, that's great!
This should work well for ad campaigns (or Facebook) where the URL isn't visible. Any suggestion for the television example given? Is there a best practice for tracking a URL like that, where it requires the television viewer to physically type it in to their browser?
Thanks again,
Erik -
Hi Erik,
I believe you can use the Google Analytics URL Builder to accomplish what you want/need to do. Here's a link to Raven's version: http://gaconfig.com/google-analytics-url-builder/ or here's one straight from the source: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
Here is a fabulous Whiteboard Friday presented by Rachel Gerson from SEER Interactive that explains why you want to tag your campaigns and how to do it: http://moz.com/blog/why-google-analytics-tagging-matters-whiteboard-friday
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What Analytics Do You Use To Track IOS and Android?
We have about 600k downloads of our app and would like to know what cost effective analytics tool you use to gain insight into what your app users are doing? Thanks! Best... Mike
Reporting & Analytics | | 945011 -
Tracking 301 redirect traffic in Google Analytics
if I 301 redirect www.mywebsite.com to go to www.yourwebsite.com, how can I track the traffic in Google Analytics that is coming from mywebsite.com?? I don't think that's a referral traffic, is it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Armen-SEO0 -
Tracking Organic Traffic and Conversions from multiple TLDs with Google Tag Manager
Hello Guys, I want to track traffic / conversions from different domains (basically same brand - but a lot of different TLD's). The "problem" is that the main conversion which I want to track always happens on the .com TLD and all other TLD's link to there. The problem is, that now the traffic always counts as Referral Traffic, even after setting up cross domain tracking over the google tag manager... So example: Sessions begins on example.co.uk/landing-page11 after User searched on it on google. He decides to buy the product and therefore moves to example.com for the checkout process. No I will have the conversion in my google analytics under referral with example.co.uk. --> but I want to have it under organic, and not under referral. How I can manage this? Thanks for you Help!
Reporting & Analytics | | _Heiko_0 -
Cross Domain Tracking for multiple sub-domains with multi-lingual and culture versions
Hi, I have a question regarding cross-domain tracking that I haven't seen answered completely elsewhere. A client has a main domain, we'll say www.example.com and 4 or 5 sub-domains e.g. shop.example.com, support.example.com, account.example.com and service.example.com. The different sub-domains are managed by different third parties, with just www.example.com and account.example.com under our control. To add a further dimension, these sites all have multi-lingual versions as folders and in some cases multi-cultural versions e.g. www.example.com/de/ for Germany and www.example.com/ch-de/ for German-speaking Swiss. Not every language/culture has an equivalent site in place for each of the sub-domains e.g. the UK support site serves Denmark and Swiss-German users will use the German site: www.example.com/dk/ links to support.example.com/uk/ for support-based content
Reporting & Analytics | | Nobody1565908128979
www.example.com/ch-de/ links to support.example.com/de/ At present, they use different analytics tracking codes and accounts. Moving forward, they would like to consolidate the data together to be able to see the collective and separate performances. They would also like to be able to see goal completions from referrals when someone clicks from the main domain to the sub-domain or across sub-domains or potentially across language and culture too. I have several questions I would really appreciate some guidance on: What will be the best way to configure Google Analytics to achieve this? Will we need to decorate the HTML links in between each of the sites? Will we need to use a new Google Analytics property? It may not be easy to answer this based on the information above, so I'm happy to provide additional information if required. Thanks in advance for your help.0 -
Domain redirect for direct mail (source) tracking in Analytics?
We have a client that would like to do some direct mail marketing and the plan is to use a short/simple domain in the marketing materials, which redirects to the main site domain. By default this would show as a referral traffic source in Analytics, right? So any traffic that came through that redirect would be attributed to "shortdomain.com / referral"? Meaning I wouldn't need to do any sort of customized, advanced tracking set up to track conversions that I've already set up (ecomm and goals) and attribute them to this new source? Just double checking that I'm not overlooking something. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | VTDesignWorks0 -
Event Tracking Not Working
Hey there. Could use some help in figuring on why the event tracking code on this site http://www.baltimoreareahondadealers.com is not working. There is code on all external domain links but none seem to be firing. Inspect all the map links to view code ie. Search New Honda Inventory What am I missing? Thanks so much. -Caryn
Reporting & Analytics | | Caryn0 -
Tracking Referring Sources - Google Analytics - Ecommerce
I need some help from anyone that has deal with this issue before.. We are currently running BigCommerce for the shopping cart on chinamist.com. We have enabled e-commerce tracking through Google Analytics and the revenue tracks perfectly. The only issue is that the referring sources are not tracking directly to the revenue being displayed - for the source, all analytics shows is (none). The assumption is that the tracking issue is a result of having a domain and subdomain.. but 'domain and subdomain' was selected when setting up the sites' advanced analytics script. Does anyone have any tips? We've run into a dead end here.. One final note, we're running an Adwords campaign which is showing conversions through the Adwords side of reporting. After integrating the Adwords and Analytics accounts, the analaytics account is still not showing revenue/conversions from Adwords as a source. Appreciate the feedback.
Reporting & Analytics | | Investis_Digital0 -
Is IP tracking of visitor allowed?
Hi, Google Analytics does not provide IP addresss of the visitors. What if i develop some in-house tracking mechanism to do so? Is it allowed or will Google penalize me if it comes to know about it? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | IM_Learner0