Google Analytics provides a vast array of statistics to help you understand visitor characteristics, behavior and more. It can also assist in measuring, evaluating and planning online promotions or public relations plans.

Measuring, evaluating and planning

Measuring the outcomes of a promotion can be fairly straightforward. Typically, it focuses on the numbers, such as the number of visitors over a time period or the number of pages visited.

Evaluating goes a step deeper by using predetermined goals to determine the promotion’s success. Evaluation uses specific statistics to decide if the promotion reached its desired scope, generated the target amount of traffic or resulted in a specific action by visitors.

Planning involves understanding the dimensions, metrics and tracking tools in analytics and incorporating them into your communication tactics from the beginning.

Campaign tracking

Campaign tracking or tagging URLs is a basic way to begin evaluating the success of your promotions. By defining a source, medium and campaign for your destination URL, you can track visitors’ usage of links that you provide through social media, emails, newsletters, releases and more:

• utm_source=origin of referral (i.e. release, bulletin, homepage)
• utm_medium=qualifies the source (i.e. email, online, feature)
• utm_campaign=topic of link or promotion (i.e. diversity, summervisit)
• utm_content=further describes the campaign (optional—use if a campaign will cover multiple sites/topics

Example of campaign tracking

The Missouri State Magazine offers an online version of its print publication, including special online features. Links to the online site are provided via email, homepage features, social media and ads.

Campaign tracking is used to differentiate the traffic these sources create. When a new issue of the Missouri State Magazine is released, a new campaign is defined, such as fall2011mag. Then, source and medium are defined for each sharing of the link as shown below for the Bear Bulletin email:

• utm_source=bearbulletin
• utm_medium=email
• utm_campaign=fall2011mag

The above tracking information is added to the back end of the magazine’s URL:

http://magazine.missouristate.edu/?utm_source=bearbulletin&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fall2011mag

Don’t forget to use the ? at the beginning and the & in between tracking elements. Because these links are long and rather ugly looking, it is best to embed them through hyperlinked text or shorten using a URL shortener like bit.ly.

The Google Analytics view of campaign tracking

So how does campaign tracking help? By defining a source for a direct link, you can cut down the number of direct referrals that show up in your analytics. Also, it helps you better determine how people are accessing your site and if they are using the links you provide.

One of the standard reports in Google Analytics is the Campaigns report under Traffic Sources. This report shows all campaigns—URLs with a defined utm_campaign—that drove traffic to your site.

The photo below shows the source/medium combination that directed the most traffic to the online Missouri State Magazine during its fall issue, which was defined as the fall2011mag campaign: