As consumers, we sometimes overlook the fine details of the communications we receive. Have you ever noticed those little snippets of text at the end of URLs in emails you receive or links you click on? These are known as tracking metrics and play a crucial role in how companies understand and improve our online experiences.
Let’s think about it for a moment: Every time you click on a link in an email, it will likely be “tracked.” This is not something to worry about regarding privacy but rather a technical aspect of digital marketing. The metrics in these URLs tell a story about how you interact with content and help companies understand what interests you, what motivates you to click, and how they can improve your experience with their products or services.
This post is intended to introduce you to link tracking. This will allow you to understand where your visitors come from and how they interact with your content.
Campaign URL Builder is an essential tool in this regard. It provides detailed and specific information about the performance of your campaigns.
What is URL Builder and its Importance in Measuring Results?
URL Builder is a tool that allows you to add ‘tracking parameters’ to your URLs. These parameters are tags appended to the end of a standard URL and serve to track vital information about the traffic source, the medium, and the specific campaign.
URL Builder Parameter Structure:
- Source: Identifies the traffic source (e.g., Google, newsletter, Facebook).
- Medium: The marketing medium (e.g., email, CPC, social).
- Campaign: The specific name of the campaign.
- Term: Keywords for paid campaigns.
- Content: Used to differentiate similar links or content within the same campaign.
The Need to Use Campaign URL Builder
By using URL Builder, you can assign unique parameters to each link in your campaigns, allowing you to track the performance of each channel accurately. This is crucial to understand which tactics are most effective and how to optimize your future campaigns based on real data.
How do we analyze the traffic generated?
First of all, I advise you to have Google Analytics 4 connected to your website to measure its results. Google Analytics will allow you to analyze the traffic of your campaigns perfectly using the parameters generated with Campaign URL Builder. You can enable the display of these sources from Reports-Traffic Acquisition by adding in Source Campaigns to include this data in your Analytics dashboard.
In addition, you can build a dashboard with Looker another free Google tool that will allow you to generate very detailed dashboards in relation to your website traffic, including your tracked campaigns.
Practical Example of URL Builder Usage
Let’s say you are promoting a new product across multiple platforms. You create a Google Ads campaign, Facebook and Instagram posts, and send an email newsletter. Using URL Builder, you could create links like these
- For Google Ads: http://tusitio.com/producto?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=lanzamiento_producto
- For Facebook: http://tusitio.com/producto?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=lanzamiento_producto
- For Instagram: http://tusitio.com/producto?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=lanzamiento_producto
- For Email: http://tusitio.com/producto?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=lanzamiento_producto
Continuing with the construction of this URL, inside Campaign URL Builder you will get the link to use in your ad campaigns, landings buttons, blog or social media content that will allow you to perform a correct tracking.
These tracked links will allow you to see exactly how much traffic and conversions each channel is generating, which will help you optimize your marketing strategies.
From now on “don’t generate another URL without it being “tracked””.
Have a good week!
