Are you trying to prove the ROI of a recent campaign? Do you need to be able to segment the traffic coming from your different marketing initiatives? Google Analytics can be a powerful tool for doing both of these things and so much more.But, where do you start?

Set-Up

First of all, if you haven’t set up a Google Analytics account yet for your website or landing pages, do it—its free! Once you have set up your account, you’ll want to paste the code onto every page you would potentially want to track. This code can be found by going to:
Next, you’ll want to set up goals from your campaign.

What is the goal of your campaign? Are you trying to get users to request more information about a program? Are you trying to get users to engage more on your website with videos and other content? Whatever your goal is, Google Analytics can help track it.

After you have set up goals, set up segments to filter traffic for your campaigns.

This will help you segment traffic by each of your marketing initiatives. For example, if you are running a digital advertising campaign on Facebook, you can get up a segment to only show this traffic. The terms you use will depend on what you use to tag your URLs which brings me to my next topic…

URL Tagging

Tagging URLS is necessary for tracking and reporting campaign data in your Google Analytics account. By using Google UTM tracking parameters, you can tag your URLs to signify what traffic campaign from which advertising channel, campaign, etc.

Use Google’s URL Builder tool to build out your tagged URLs here. Cutroni.com also has a great table that explains how to use each tracking parameter.

cutroni.com

Examples of tagged URLs:

• http://convergeconsulting.org/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=january
• http://convergeconsulting.org/events/webinars/webinar-universal-analytics-why-and-how-switch/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=analytics-webinar
• http://convergeconsulting.org/converge-2015/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=new-orleans&utm_campaign=converge-2015

There’s really no right or wrong way to tag your URLs just as long as you remember how you tagged them when you go to view your reporting data in Google Analytics.

Note: Some ad channels such as Google AdWords has the option for auto-tagging. If you turn that on and sync your AdWords and Analytics accounts together, you can view campaign performance all the way down to the keyword!

Reporting

Lastly, you need to be able to report on your campaigns to prove the performance of your campaign. The easiest way to do this is by creating a dashboard.

A dashboard is a collection of widgets that give you an overview of the reports and metrics you care about most. They are pretty simple to create and Google actually offers a lot of pre-built dashboards to match your advertising initiatives.

If you are reporting on a digital advertising campaign, page views, goal completions, average time on page by source/medium are all metrics that are important to a campaign. If you are reporting on performance from a social media campaign, on-site social actions, content sharing and overall traffic by social media source would all be important to report on.

What’s Next?

Use your data to prove what works, what doesn’t and what you can improve on. We hope this information helped! For more insight on Google Analytics, register for our upcoming webinar: Universal Analytics: Why and How to Switch.