Help Google Analytics Make Sense of Your Marketing Campaigns

If a client has PPC campaigns in Google, Yahoo, and MSN, we want to make sure they are all tagged in such a way that Google Analytics can make the most sense out of all your marketing campaigns. In fact, this applies to e-mail and banner campaigns too.

For Google, you just need the auto tagging of URLs feature turned on inside of AdWords (and it should be turned on by default). For others like Yahoo, MSN, and e-mails, you need to go to Google URL builder. . Let us walk through one example of using this tool.

Let’s say your landing page is and you are running a Yahoo PPC campaign for T1 internet services to it. Let’s also say that the keyword that triggers this ad is “t1” without the quotes.

1. Stick the landing page URL into the Website URL box.
2. Campaign Source will be yahoo (note the lower case spelling).
3. Campaign Medium will be cpc.
4. Campaign Term will be different for every keyword inside your campaign. We are building a URL for the keyword of t1 so Campaign Term will be t1.
5. Campaign Content would be left blank in this case but in another campaign such as e-mail you would use this field to differentiate between parts of your e-mail.
6. Campaign Name would be whatever the campaign name was in Yahoo PPC. We add ysm_ as a prefix so we know it was a Yahoo campaign in any analytics reports we read later. So let’s put in ysm_T1_InternetServices.

Click on Generate URL and you get:

&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=t1&utm_campaign=ysm_T1_InternetServices

You have to disable auto tagging of URLs in Yahoo and instead manually give it these generated URLs. Now whenever someone clicks on that Yahoo ad to come to your landing page, Google Analytics will decipher all the utm variables in the landing page URL and sort the data appropriately.

For editing a large number of URLs it may make sense to use a spreadsheet like the one provided by our friends at epikone.com