What You Can Learn from John

I’m going to tell you a story about e-commerce store owner John and e-commerce store owner Chris. Both John and Chris decided to invest heavily in online marketing for their stores through several channels: comparison shopping engines (Shopping.com, Shopzilla, etc), Pay-per-click engines (AdWords, MSN, Yahoo) and some in-house e-mail specials to voluntary subscribers.

John is interested in measuring the performance of each channel while Chris simply hopes these campaign generate sales. Because John wants to be successful he is tagging all of his links so he can more closely monitor the campaigns performances in Google Analytics.

Tagging Links Pays Dividends to your Campaigns

Because he tagged all his links John discovers after the first month that Shopzilla generated heavy traffic but no sales and AdWords, Shopping.com and MSN all lead to several orders. Yahoo didn’t generate any sales but did lead to several e-mail opt-ins which he is tracking under Goal 2. Armed with this information John decided to stop using Shopzilla, and instead allocated those marketing funds towards AdWords, Shopping.com and MSN.

Chris is not tagging his links so he is unable to evaluate each channels performance like John was and spends the same amount each month on every channel. He doesn’t know that his money to Shopzilla is going down the toilet!

Don’t want to be like Chris? I didn’t think so!

What is Link Tagging in Google Analytics?

In short link tagging is adding special characters to the end of your URLs that will allows you to identify the traffic that uses it. You can easily tag your links with Google’s URL Toolbuilder. Google will ask you to specify the following things for tagging (three are required):

Campaign Source (referrer: google, msn, shopping.com)
Campaign Medium (marketing medium: cpc, ppc, email, banner)
Campaign Term (identify paid keywords here for Yahoo and MSN) optional
Campaign Content (used to differentiate between two competing ads) optional
Campaign Name (product, slogan, date)

To continue with our example John is preparing to tag his links for a Shopping.com feed he will be using. He decides to enter the following:

Campaign Source: shopping
Campaign Medium: ppc (since he is paying her click he is labeling it as ppc)
Campaign Term: not used
Campaign Content: not used
Campaign Name: q42009fx (this is his internal campaign tracking code).

Entering these variables in the Google URL builder with the page www.johnswebsite.com/product1.html he would end up with:

http://www.johnswebsite.com/product1.html ?utm_source=shopping&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=q42009fx

All set! In Excel for his shopping feed he could quickly append ?utm_source=shopping&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=q42009fx to all the product urls and have everything tagged.

What Does Link Tagging Actually Do?

When a link is tagged that means it will show up in Google Analytics under the variables you specified. So John would see the following if he looked at his Traffic Sources -> All Traffic Sources report after receiving traffic from these links:

This gives John the ability to monitor his traffic quality from Shopping.com: bounce rates, time on site, revenue, conversion rate, etc. Since everything is tagged he can easily view all channels performance to compare and contrast as illustrated from the earlier example.

What Should You Tag?

Almost everything! Here is a list to get you started (by no means exhaustive)

Shopping Engines
Google Base
Yahoo Paid Search
Bing Paid Search
E-mails (newsletters, blasts, signature links, etc)
Forum banners
Direct Mail Campaigns (using a vanity url with .htaccess redirect)

Tag, track and review your campaigns at least quarterly – if not monthly, for optimal profits. Good luck!

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