Google Analytics Campaign Tracking : ROI Analysis

Tracking your source of visitors is very important, and Google Analytics’s campaign tracking allows you to measure your success from various sources. Possible area of investments that could be done in traffic driving initiatives are; banners, e-mails, link exchange, offline to online via friendly URL, etc.

Before you implement the tracking information into the URI, think through of the following data elements. Source, Medium, Name of the Campaign, Content, and Terms (if PPC).

Campaign Source
Obviously, the source is required to identify where the traffic is coming from.
What to use: utm_source
Example: Craigslist, Newletter-May2008, AdWords_PPC, etc.

Medium
Medium is to identify the medium of the campaign that it resides on.
What to use: utm_medium
Example: E-mail, CPC (cost-per-click), Banner

Campaign Name
Assign campaign name to identify a specific promotion or strategic campaign
What to use: utm_campaign
Example: Summer sale, XYZ Product Sale, Free T-shirt Campaign

Content (optional)
Used to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL. Likely used for A/B testing.
What to use: utm_content
Example: image link, text link

Term (optional)
Used for paid search. It will identify the keywords used for the ad.
What to use: utm_term
The result could look something like this:

Google provides a URL builder tool that makes this process very easy.

The interesting thing about the Google Analytic’s campaign logging is that it reads the client’s first-party cookie, and it increments the session counter in the cookie. Therefore, Google Analytics knows the original referral. So this allows Google Analytics to do multi-session tracking. Good stuff!

Since you want to know your ROI on your effort of the campaigns and promotions, you probably don’t want to forget to set up the goal or conversion data in Google Analytics. That will tie the source to conversion and close the loop of your ROI analysis.