The perfect way for tracking all of our ad and marketing campaigns can be done through Google Analytics. It is a great tool and helps in measuring our ROI (return on investment.) Here is how it works.
Track the campaigns
Whether you are spending money on banner ads or investing time in email newsletters, it is important to know whether the efforts you are giving are even paying off. By using the tracking codes you can determine which types of campaigns deliver traffic to your site, generate leads, and get people to click on a buy now button if in case it is an E-Commerce Website.
Setting up the tracking codes
While setting up you don’t need to add the tracking code to all the incoming links, as most of the inbound traffic is easy to measure by default through Google Analytics. Instead, you should focus on email newsletters, banner ads, and non-Google pay-per-click campaigns. Inbound traffic from these sources is often not soo easy to track and requires additional work to measure precisely. Secondly, there are five tracking variables, but you will have to deal with three of them
* Campaign Source: For Example, the name of the website where the ad is running or which issue of the email newsletter the link is from.
* Campaign Medium: Used to specify the medium where the link will appear, such as pay-per-click, email, or banner ad or email.
* Campaign Name: This helps you to differentiate between different types of campaigns, such as the June newsletter vs. Oct newsletter, or test different banner ads.
If it seems overly complex, then you don’t need to worry, Google offers a tool for tracking variables called the URL Builder that will generate the links for you. You Need to simply enter these four pieces of information mentioned below.
1.) The website URL you are linking to.
2.) The Source of the campaign.
3.) The campaign medium.
4.) The name you want to give to your campaign.
Then click on the Generate URL button. Google will provide you with the URL ready to be cut-and-paste.
If you want to track your banner ad performance, you need to provide the tracking URL to the website where you are advertising along with the banner ad. If this is for an email newsletter then just use the tracking URL in place of the regular link.
Measuring The Results
Once the campaign is launched, you will be able to measure your success rate over Google Analytics.
Tracking Campaigns on Google Analytics
It will capture month-wise the email newsletter generated and how many visited your website and time spent and how long time than the average visitor. You can also see that on Google Places ads, the number of people drive in the past month, and how much better than average pages/visit and average time spent on your site. This result in getting a closer look at Google Places and how it fits into the rest of the marketing.
The suggestion is that you need to always use the tracking codes for the ad campaigns and email newsletters. This helps in measuring the results that you can improve your ROI and build a stronger, and more effective web presence.
