THE INTELLIBLOGSOnline Marketing Under the Hood – Part II
Thursday, October 9, 2008 at 11:10AM One of the greatest things about Google Analytics is the level of detail you can get about the performance of individual banner ads or email campaigns. For example, when we go to Facebook and see an ad that captures our attention, we tend to look at it for a few seconds and (maybe) click on it if the offer’s compelling… or at least more interesting than our most recent wall post.
At FIU, we run ads on Facebook to invite people to our information sessions, and we also invite people through email campaigns. That process seems very easy. People click on the ad or email, pick the date, fill out the form…done.
That’s what we want people to do. And, we can track total registrations in our event manager, but how do we know whether they’re coming from Facebook or an email campaign, or some other source for that matter? The answer is Google Analytics.
By simply tagging our URLs for each channel, every time someone RSVPs for an event we can see in our reports which channel delivered more registrations.
First, you need a Google Analytics account.
Second, Google provides a free tool for tagging your URLs that’s very easy to use. You provide the original URL, type a source (where your visitors are coming from), add a medium (banner, email, etc.), Click on Generate URL and you will get the URL with all these parameters.
This tool can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&hl=en
Once the Google Analytics code is tracking your site’s traffic, you can copy this generated URL with all these parameters and use it on your ads, email campaigns, and other referring sources to see which channels are delivering visitors to your site. Google Analytics will take those parameters and show them to you in a clean report.
This is an example of creating an email template in Intelliworks with a tagged URL.
OK, so you have Google Analytics gathering data, you’ve tagged your URLs and you’re ready to launch your campaigns. Now what? Check back tomorrow for part III!
Joel Cloralt is E-Marketing Coordinator at Florida International University.
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