Want to see how much traffic you get from Instagram?
What about Pinterest? Or your Google Listing?
This episode shows you how to do just that. And in detail. I also share tips that sometimes people aren’t aware of to ensure the tracking is set up properly so your data isn’t skewed.
00:32 The Importance of Tracking Your Marketing Efforts
01:19 Mastering UTM Codes for Effective Tracking
02:01 Setting Up and Utilizing Tracking URLs
05:08 Tips for Organizing and Implementing Tracking Links
05:40 The Impact of Tracking on Analytics and Reporting
Resources
Example tracking link format…
https://yourbusiness.com?parameter=value
https://yourbusiness.com?utm_medium=something&utm_source=something&utm_campaign=something
Example tracking link for emails if your platform doesn’t do it automatically…
https://yourbusiness.com?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter
My tracking link generator (no email address needed)
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tbdRaw Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the small business sweet spot. I’m your host Barb Davids, and this show is dedicated to helping small business owners like you get more organic website traffic and also to help create and distribute content and analyzing the numbers so that we can make better informed marketing decisions. It is action oriented, direct, and conversational. And if you’ve been looking for SEO or content marketing help, please stick around to the very end where I share about the group coaching program, small business sweet spot. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go.
Raise your hand. If you’re a good business owner who tracks all, okay. Most of the links you throw out into the world. I’m talking about all your social posts, that link to blogs. Your email campaigns, that link to services and your paid ads that link to your site.
What percentage of them roughly do you track so you can analyze later and find out if they’ve worked. If your answer is currently not many because you don’t have time for all of that. I’ve got some good news coming your way.
With the help of a clever bit of code, you can easily set up a way to track your marketing efforts.
And you can use that same bit of code to see in Google analytics. What’s working. And just as importantly, and maybe more importantly, what’s not working so less time and money is wasted on marketing. That’s not working for your business.
And I can appreciate that. If you’re listening to this without the supporting video, it may be hard to follow along. I will do my best to explain this code tracking verbally. I have a supporting blog post with all this information that is in the show notes for you.
Okay, let’s jump into what you’re here for the tracking. To track the links you put out into the world. You add tracking parameters. Also known as UTM codes. I’m not going to give you the history of these. You can Google that what’s important is that with these codes, you can see exactly where a visitor is coming from. Want to know if someone came from Instagram stories, you can track that. Want to know if someone came from a link in your signature, you can track that. Want to know if someone came from your Google listing.
You have to track that. Otherwise, it will show up in organic. But not as from your Google listing specifically.
We’re going to add words at the end of our website URLs, before we put them in our marketing assets. I’m going to go through the format. First, provide you some tips. And then provide some examples.
The example URL I’m going to use is your business.com. Typically, it actually has HTTPS colon forward slash forward slash before it.
And what that means is that you have a secure website. Whole other topic, not going to go into it today, but if you don’t have HTTPS, you do want to look into that. So we have HTTPS your business.com. Some URLs have the www in front and some do not. That doesn’t affect the tracking. We’re about to set up.
After the URL. You’ll add a question, mark followed by a parameter name and then it’s value. Otherwise known as a key value pair. The value is matched to a word. So it will look like this.
H T T P S colon forward slash forward slash your business.com. Question mark parameter word equals value word.
The question. Mark is an indicator to tell Google analytics. Hey. There’s some crap coming after this that you need to pay attention to.
The parameter words are predefined by Google. Some are required. Some are optional. All our case sensitive. 📍 If, when you’re doing this tracking, you use a capitalized word one day and a non capitalized word another day for the same tracking.
Pandemonium will be unleashed.
Well, not really, but your reporting won’t be clean. And for some of us that can cause some anxiety.
I’m going to cover only the required ones here today. So the first parameter is
UTM underscore medium. The medium is the main channel. Your link is running on when creating a UTM code. There’s a big list of default channels to choose from. Because remember. We want to be consistent to what’s already in analytics. These are things like organic search, social and referral. The blog and the show notes provides others.
The next parameter is UTM underscore source. Each medium can have several traffic sources. And so the source parameter tells you the specific place your visitor has come from. For example, Google is a source of the organic traffic, medium. Facebook is a source of the social media, medium and so on.
The last required parameter is UTM underscore campaign. This will be something to identify your link by either campaign. Name, product name, something that delineated it from other links coming from the same source or medium. And ideally your campaign name is the same name across other sources and mediums.
In between each parameter and its value, you’ll place an ampersand. And it’s best to use dashes in place of spaces. So when the URL gets used by copying and pasting, Nothing gets lost. It’s not required though.
And Google does have a tool that allows you to input your values, and it will provide you the full URL so that you can easily copy paste, but it doesn’t retain any previously created ones.
So you might be creating new campaigns. And sources and mediums all willy-nilly. And they will appear completely unorganized in your analytics.
So I created a Google sheet that tracks all of the campaigns and it auto-populates the tracking URL. You can find a link to that in the show notes.
A note to remember only track external links, not internal links. This is very important because if you track internal links, It shows up as a brand new session and your conversions will be attributed incorrectly, which defeats the whole purpose of tracking.
One thing that bothers me is how Google sometimes doesn’t show some parts of social media links. You can’t see from where on Instagram, someone is coming from.
Did they come from a post?
Did they come from stories?
Using tracking links, you can see this. Granted, not many people leave the platform, but for some campaigns, I still do want to see if anyone clicked out to my website.
Some email providers have it set. So all you have to do is check a box and provide a couple of details and it will add the tracking links for you. Some do not. And you have to add them to every single link in every single email. In that case, I do find a way to make it easy. So I’m not having to change all the links. In every single email.
It’s a long example and too hard to do on the verbal side.
So you can check the show notes for an example of that.
The level and detail you use in your tracking links will depend on how much detail you want in your analytics. 📍 Now that you have your links tracked. Here’s where you can go to find the report. Open up your Google analytics, click reports. Acquisition. Traffic acquisition. The default shows what Google specifies as default channel group, but you can edit it to show source and medium.
The key takeaway from this episode is that if you want to effectively measure the performance of your marketing, you should add tracking onto your external links.
Stay tuned for more episodes on making your business thrive online.
See you in the next sweet spot. Cheers.
Thank you for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you’re looking for SEO and content marketing help, consider joining the small business sweet spot. It’s a group coaching program where you can get answers to your questions about your business directly and clarity around the marketing strategies that you would like to implement in your business.
You can find all kinds of information at compassdigitalstrategies. com. And if you liked the episode, please tell a friend. Cheers.
