In the past year and a half, I’ve found campaign tagging to be an integral part of optimizing and then determining the success of my marketing projects. It’s the easiest step you can take today to help calculate the ROI of your projects and campaigns.

Defining Campaign Tagging

Campaign tags—also referred to as UTM codes—are custom parameters added to the URLs used in your marketing campaigns. The tags define the overall project and the pieces of it you want to optimize, like image selection, text and content order.

Why Campaign Tags are Important

The customized tags populate information into your Google Analytics account as users visit your site through the links in your campaigns. Segmenting the traffic by tags once you’re in Google Analytics allows you to analyze the effectiveness of your overall campaign and its individual pieces.

When to Use Campaign Tags

You should always use campaign-tagged URLs in marketing efforts that push traffic from an outside website, platform or property back to your own.

Example 1: You send an email to your alumni to register for homecoming on your events page.

• Use tagged URLs in the hyperlinks and/or buttons in the email that link to the registration page.

Example 2: You run a Facebook ad soliciting donations for the choral group’s annual show trip.

• Use a tagged URL for the link from the Facebook ad to the donation form.

Example 3: You schedule a tweet promoting a blog about a prominent faculty member’s research efforts.

• Use a tagged URL in the link from the tweet to the blog page.

Pro Tip: If your university or alumni organization hosts content on multiple domains and web properties, like WordPress for your blog and Drupal for your website, be sure to correctly implement cross-domain tracking in your instance of Google Analytics. If you don’t, the campaign tagging will only take you so far in your analysis. Without cross-domain tracking implemented between your properties, your blog will show up as a referral to your website, for example, and the session will break. You’ll lose the overall picture of your users’ visits from landing page through the true end of their session.

When NOT to Use Campaign Tags

Since you can review users’ paths through your site during their sessions, links between pages on your own properties do not require campaign tags.

Example 1: Linking from your homepage to a featured blog post on your site does not require a campaign tagged URL.

Example 2: Linking from a donor story about scholarships to a donation form for the featured fund does not require a campaign tagged URL.

Campaign tags are only useful to analyze inbound traffic to your own site or web properties, so you don’t need to use them when promoting others’ sites or directing traffic to your social media pages.

Example 1: Your university tops the list of U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges of 2016 and you post the link to the article on usnews.com to your Facebook page.

• You do not need to use a campaign tagged URL.

Example 2: Science magazine promotes a faculty member’s research as a key breakthrough for understanding human evolution. You promote the story in your alumni e-newsletter, linking back to the original article on sciencemag.org.

• You do not need to use a campaign tagged URL.

Example 3: A Facebook post from your institution’s account prompts followers to “Like” the new mascot’s Facebook page.

• You do not need to use a campaign tagged URL.

Develop a Standardized Naming Structure

Collaborate with your colleagues to create a standardized naming structure for your college, department or unit before implementing campaign tags. Strong proof of concept might be enough to recruit communicators from across the university to expand what you started to an institution-wide naming system.

The Rules of Campaign Tagging

Rule 1: lowercase everything

• Google Analytics treats tags with the same text but different cases as completely different tags. To prevent confusion on capitalization rules for tags among your colleagues, be safe and lowercase everything.

Rule 2: Use-hyphens-between-words

Rule 3: Document your links

• Keeping a spreadsheet of the custom tags you’ve used for your marketing efforts means you can easily segment your traffic in Google Analytics to review the success of select campaigns. Good news! I’ve developed a sample spreadsheet complete with concatenation coding so you can start documenting your campaign tags today.

Building Google Analytics Links

Step 1: URL

• Start with the shortest version of the URL for the page you want to promote.
• Example: https://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2016/01/22/cementing-societal-and-technological-growth-through-research

Step 2: Source

• Where are you publishing the link? Where will people see it?
• Example: tamu-newsletter

Step 3: Medium

• What method of distribution are you using?
• Example: Email

Step 4: Content

• This will be your most detailed custom tag. Ask yourself if you’re promoting a specific issue of something, like the January issue of your e-newsletter.
• Example: 2016-january
• Then build on from there. Is there a specific image or headline you’re using? Build on to the content tag with more hyphens
• Example: 2016-january-facultyphoto-topresearch

Step 5: Campaign

• How does your organization categorize content? At the Texas A&M Foundation, we had Impact Areas to categorize how donors gave back to the university. You can also add college, program or departmental names for more detail.
• Example: faculty-impact-engineering-civil

The Tagged URL

After you add each of the tags into the spreadsheet, it will combine them for you with the concatenation code. The resulting tagged URL will look like this:

https://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2016/01/22/cementing-societal-and-technological-growth-through-research?utm_source=tamu-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=2016-january-facultyphoto-topresearch&utm_campaign=faculty-impact-engineering-civil

Pro Tip: Use a URL Shortener

To reduce the likelihood of user error in transferring lengthy URLs to email or social media campaigns, I typically use a URL shortener. There are a variety to choose from between bit.ly, Hootsuite, Hubspot and even custom university URL shorteners like tx.ag for us Aggies.

Next Steps

Now that you’re using campaign tags in your marketing efforts, check out my webinar with Converge’s Ryan Lindsay, “Prove Marketing ROI with Campaign Tracking in #GoogleAnalytics,” for more information on how to segment and analyze your traffic.