Are you curious about who is clicking on your site and where it comes from? We get to know you about how to do URL tracking clicks in Google Analytics so you can better find out what content is driving results.
Google Analytics is a must-have tool for all marketers. It helps you better understand your website’s influence and how your marketing channels drive traffic to your site.
Moreover, we found that 90% of marketers consider Google Analytics their top choice for marketing measurement.
Therefore, we will cover all detailed guides on link tracking in Google Analytics
You can also read our beneficial Guide: Use Search Analytics Report Of GWT To Pull More Traffic From Search Result
What Is URL Tracking?
URL tracking is the process of adding uncommon identifiers to your final URLs. You are missing out on helpful information if you won’t tag your links for tracking in either Google Analytics or another analytics platform.
However, when you manage PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns with other online marketing efforts, it is mandatory to separate your data. For instance, in Google Analytics, if you don’t take care to tag your final URLs, your received data will be meaningless. Let’s suppose that you are running an SEO campaign well in Microsoft’s organic result, and now you have Microsoft Advertising ongoing full force with PPC traffic. If you don’t tag your URLs, all the visitors, including PPC and SEO, will be labeled as “organic” in Google Analytics.
you can read our guide Make SEO friendly URL in wordpress, if you want to get advantage of google ranking factor:
What Is URL Tracking In Google Analytics?
Link tracking in Google Analytics is a process where you isolate a specific link on a particular channel or campaign to understand its effect in terms of:
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Leads
- Sales
By using Google Analytics, you can visualize the overall performance of any given page. However, you can’t section this down by a particular link, whether it is internal or external. Therefore, there are some quick fixes. You can use either:
- UTM tagging and parameters
- Google Tag Manager event tracking
Initiate Google Analytics Tracking
You need a Google Analytics account linked to your website with a custom tracking code in order to enable this feature. After that, consider the below-given instructions:
- Tap your profile image at the top right, then choose Account settings.
- Tap Analytics tracking settings
- Click Enable Google Analytics integration, then put in the domains you want to track.
- Select Save analytics
Moreover, there is an optional section, “campaign Source.” We auto-tag all tracked links with utm_medium=email. If you want to track several online marketing campaigns in Google Analytics, then you will use this to apply a more particular term than “email.”
How to Do Internal URL Tracking With UTM Tagging
The fastest and easiest way to track links in Google Analytics is to put up UTM parameters. It is easy to use and monitor. You must use a URL or link builder to generate an accountable link for every new link including another blog link, a social post, or an email.
Moreover, Google has created a URL builder through which you can track links.
Here are the following steps:
- Enter the link you want to track.
- Add the three main parameters which you want to track;
Source: This tells Google where traffic is coming from
Medium: This tells Google what kind of source it’s coming from, like paid, social, or emails
Name: This is the naming of your campaign. You have to make it simple and clear.
- Tap on “Copy URL,” and it into your email newsletter like an ad, social, etc.
How To View UTM Campaigns In Google Analytics
If you are speculating how to track UTM links in Google Analytics, this is easy. It would be best if you simply headed to Acquisition > Campaigns.
Here, you will see how many visits you received from your campaign, how long they stayed, and how many pages they visited on average while there were a bounce rate and conversions.
Tracking Links Clicks While Using Google Tag Manager
After your G4 (Google Analytics) is set up for link tracking, you have to do the following:
- View data streams– will help you track events such as page views, scroll, file download, etc.
- Set up custom link clicks – it will help to track specific links.
3 Types of Analytics URL Tagging
Auto-Tagging
Auto-tagging is enabled after your Google Analytics is linked with your Google Ads account; you don’t tag your Google Ads URLs manually. It will automatically track your Google Ads campaigns. But it would help if you tagged your non-Google Ads paid ad links. Google Ads account will be selected auto-tagging by default.
To permit, or prevent, auto-tagging, go to “Account Setting > Preferences.”
Auto-tagging is inappropriate for a small percentage of websites, and some final URLs didn’t accept additional URL parameters. For auto-tagging testing, follow the given steps:
- Tap on a version of your ad with auto-tagging enabled.
- If the resulting page will display the gc lid in the address bar and take you to a working site, it means auto-tagging is working.
- If you do not see a GC lid in the address bar or if you see an error in the resulting page, switch off auto-tagging.
2. Manual Tagging For Google Analytics
Manually tagging your URLs, Analytics needs to use Google Analytics URL Builder to create the proper tagging.
Here’s the Google explanation of the different parameters:
- Website URL – enter your desired landing page URL.
- Campaign Source – write where your visits will be coming from. If it is going to be Yahoo’s PPC, type in Yahoo.
- Campaign Medium – that is sending traffic to your site. If it is a banner ad, then write in “banner.” If it is cost-per-click advertising with Bing, Yahoo, and Google, then type in “cpc.”
- Campaign Name – enter a name that will help you differentiate the traffic from other campaigns and stay organized.
Furthermore, you have to label your URLs in the same manner. Otherwise, Google Analytics will watch out the capitalization differences like cpc vs. CPC.
However, to build your URLs, you can use the Analytics URL Builder or generate a URL builder in excel, which is well organized specifically for creating URLs in bulk.
3. Manual Tagging For Backend System
When you want to use the Google Ads URLs backend system, you have to use ValueTrack Parameters. It is best when a user clicks your ad and visits your website; ValueTrack records precise details about the URL ad.
Here is the list of ValueTrack parameters for PPC:
- {matchtype}– It triggered your ad
- {network}– The click came from Google Search, Search Partners, or the Display Network
- {device}– telling you which device a user was on when clicking your ad
- {ifsearch:[value]}– Suppose your ad is clicked through a site in the Google Search Network, you’ll able to see whatever text you insert
- {ifcontent:[value]} – If your ad is clicked from a site in the Google Display Network, you’ll see whatever text you insert
- {creative}– The unique ID for a creative ad
- {keyword}– For Search the keyword that triggered your ad; for Display, the best-matching keyword
- {placement} – For Display only, the domain name of the site where the ad was clicked
- {target}– For Display only, a placement category
- {random}– A random Google-generated number
- {aceid} – The control ID or experiment ID from Google Ads
- {copy:[name]} –For Sitelinks extensions, the URL will include the actual parameter name and the value you indicate from the corresponding headline URL
- {adposition}– The position on the page that your ad appeared in
- {param1} – If you’re using AdParamService, create parameter #1
- {param2}– If you’re using AdParamService, create parameter #2
Conclusion About URL Tracking
As you continue using URL tagging for your PPC campaigns, you will search for new innovative ways to improve performance. You can make sharp-witted decisions regarding keyword level bounce rate and time on site. You can also differentiate conversion data between all your sources and the medium of site traffic. However, being a search marketer, using link tagging to track keyword data in Google Analytics will make your job easier.
