With the popularity of Twitter and Facebook clients, clicks to your website from your posts are often attributed as ‘direct traffic.’ URL shortening services like Bit.Ly often offer inaccurate or disjointed click counts. Tracking the actions and conversion of social media driven visitors.
A trick often used to track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns; tagged links attribute the source of traffic to the medium and campaign without creating dedicated landing pages or URLs. These tags can be used further in tracking traffic and conversions from social media.
Read how to track clicks from social media using Google Analytics and tagged links.
How to tag a link
Anatomy of a tag
http://YourLink.com/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMedia&utm_campaign=Optional
- utm_source:
- Platform you expect to place link into, i.e. Twitter.
- utm_medium:
- Medium used. This allows you to combine multiple sources under one report when tracking conversions from social media.
- utm_campaign:
- This is optional, but it allows for more creative tracking for advanced users and more complex marketing tactics.
Manual tagging
Tagging can be done manually. Add a question mark (?) to the tail of your link. Avoid spaces, camel caps, special characters or camel caps.
http://www.silvertech.com?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social%2BMedia&utm_campaign=Campaign
Using Google URL Builder
Many (most sane) people would prefer to use a tool designed to tag links for you. Google URL Builder (http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578) is a gem of a tool well hidden in the Analytics support files.
Google’s URL Builder allows you to input your variables, and generate a tagged URL ready for posting.
Tagged links and URL shortening services
Your link tags remain in place when using URL shortening services, which is especially helpful in the constrained spaces of Twitter.
What to do with tagged links?
Once tagged, traffic from a tagged link can be segmented in Google Analytics for advanced tracking, allowing the use to see the number of leads created by a specific tweet, or the e-commerce ROI of a specific social media strategy. Learn the easy way to use Google Analytics to track social media success.
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Tags: Analytics, corporate social media, facebook, facebook for business, google, Marc Frechette, marketing, social media, Tweet, twitter
