Understanding Where Your Traffic Is Coming From
Many different avenues can lead people to your site, ranging from ads to search
queries to people bookmarking your page and then returning. Here are the com-
mon default sources of traffic as recorded by Google Analytics:
» Email: Visits from those who have clicked the links in your email promotions
and newsletter.
» Organic search: Visits from people typing search queries into search engines
such as Google or Bing.
» Direct: Traffic from users who type the exact domain of your site, such as
Pepsi.com, into their browser and navigate straight to your site. If someone
bookmarks your page and then visits your site again via that bookmark, that
visit also registers as direct traffic.
» Paid search: Traffic from paid search is traffic you have purchased, such as
pay-per-click ads from search engines.
» Referral: Visitors from sites that link to your website, such as blogs and forums.
» Social: Visits from social channels, such as Twitter or Facebook.
Tracking the Origins of Site Visitors
Although analytics programs like Google Analytics track the origin of your site
visitors using their default settings, you’ll likely find that these default settings
are too broad to ascertain meaningful data. To get more granular (and thus more
useful) data, you can append UTM parameters to the links you share around the
web. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, and it is a tracking marker appended
to a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The UTM system allows users to tag hyper-
links in order to trace where visitors originated.
For example, if you want to track the number of leads generated by a single link
shared with your Facebook fans, you can do that using Google Analytics and a link
with UTM parameters. Simply put, you place a UTM at the end of a hyperlink so
that you can figure out how people get to your site and what they do after they get
there.
For every hyperlink you want to track, whether on your blog or your social media
channels, that directs traffic to a landing page you own, consider adding UTM
parameters. By adding this tracking code to the hyperlinks you share, you can
track the origins of that visit.
A UTM consists of various parameters. Here are the UTM parameters that matter
most:
» Campaign source (utm_source)
» Campaign medium (utm_medium)
» Campaign content (utm_content)
» Campaign name (utm_campaign)
We explain each of these parameters in the sections that follow.
Campaign source (utm_source)
Generally, the source of a UTM describes where your visitors come from. The
source tells you the specific place where the referring link was shared, such as
» An email promotion
» A social network
» A referring website
Common sources include
» Email newsletter
» YouTube
The source enables you to know which email, search engine, or Facebook ad (or
other source) a user came from. Knowing where traffic is coming from can be
powerful because you gain insight into what your users are responding to.
Campaign medium (utm_medium)
This parameter identifies the medium or vehicle that the link was used on, such
as email. Medium tells you how visitors arrived at your site. Some of the most
common mediums include
» Pay per click (PPC)
» Banner-ads
» Direct (which tells you users directly typed in your site address)
Campaign content (utm_content)
Campaign content describes the specific ad, banner, or email used to share the
link. It gives you additional details to use with A/B testing or content-targeted
ads, as well as helps you determine what creative is working best at promoting an
offer or distributing content.
Be as descriptive as possible with this parameter’s naming structure so that you
can easily remember what email or ad this UTM refers to.
Campaign name (utm_campaign)
This parameter serves as an identifier of a specific product or promotion cam-
paign, such as a spring sale or another promotion you run. The campaign name’s
basic purpose is to highlight promotional offers or content distribution strategies
so that you can easily compare performance across time and platform.
Campaign links should be consistent across all different sources and media for any
given promotion to ensure that the campaign as a whole can easily be analyzed.
Dissecting a UTM
The previous sections go over the most important parameters that make up a
UTM, and this one examines a UTM’s structure. For instance, here’s what a UTM
looks like for a flash sale for one of DigitalMarketer’s products, the Content
Engine.
&utm_medium=email: Campaign medium, which is how the user was
referred. In this case it was via email.
» &utm_content=content-engine-flash-mail-1: Campaign content, which is
the ad or campaign identifier you assign. In this case, this is the first email for
the Content Engine flash sale promotion.
» &utm_campaign=content-engine-flash-sale-1-1-16: Campaign name, which
is the specific promotion or strategy. In this case, this campaign is the Content
Engine flash sale beginning on January 1st, 2016.
Creating UTM parameters for your URLs
Google makes building UTM links super easy with a free, easy-to-use UTM builder
called the Google Analytics URL Builder. Visit the page, follow the steps, and plug
in your information to automatically generate a hyperlink with UTM parameters
that you can then track with Google Analytics — that is, if you’ve properly set up
a Google Analytics account. If you haven’t already, visit Google Analytics Help
Center. This resource contains further instructions about how you can use each of
the different UTM parameters.
Creating properly attributed hyperlinks takes some time to get used to, but the
data it provides is worth its weight in gold. To make consistency easy, create a
unified document in which you track all the hyperlinks you use, which will make
it easy to refer back to when you’re analyzing later.
UTM parameters are case sensitive, so if you use abc for your utm_campaign tags
on some links and ABC for your utm_campaign tags on other links, they show up
as separate campaigns in your Google Analytics.
Creating Goals to See Who’s Taking Action
After you’ve created a UTM tag, as described in the preceding section, you can set
up goals in Google Analytics. Goals provide a way to track the actions that groups
of people take on your site by tallying specific behaviors. What makes goals really
useful is not just the ability to track how many times an action was taken but also
to see which groups of people took that action. Although Google Analytics does not
allow you to track behavior back to personal identifiable information, such as the
person’s name or email address, it does allow you to track information such as the
device they are using, where people are in the world, or the other pages they vis-
ited on your website. Thanks to the UTM parameters, you can actually see what
individuals and groups of individuals do when they arrive on your site.
The most basic goal that you want to set in Google Analytics is an opt-in that
generates a lead. When visitors fill out a form, they are often directed to a confir-
mation page. To measure the number of opt-ins you’re receiving, you simply set
up Google Analytics to measure how many people visit the confirmation page after
visiting the opt-in page.
To set up a form fill in Google Analytics, follow these steps:
1. Click the Admin section of Google Analytics.
The Admin menu appears.
2. Click Goals under All Website Data.
The Goals dialog box appears.
3. Click the + New Goal button to create a new goal.
The Goal Setup page appears.
4. Scroll down and select the Sign Up Goal type; then click the Continue
button.
The Goal Description page appears. Google offers a variety of goal templates
that should fit your specific needs (although you can create custom ones as
well). Because you want to track opt-ins, Sign Up should be perfect in this case.
5. Name your goal and then, under the Type field, select Destination and
press the Continue button.
The final setup page, called the Goal Details page, appears.
6. Set up the specifics for your goal.
For Destination field, change your rule to Begins With and add your Thank You
page’s URL string — that’s where people who opt-in end up. Using Begins With
helps to ensure that all opt-ins are properly credited. The other way to ensure
that you’re tracking actual opt-ins and not just accidental Thank You page
visitors is to create a funnel. This involves adding the URL string of the opt-in
page as well (see Figure 12-3). To set up a funnel, you turn the Funnel option to
ON and add a step with the page field, including the URL that precedes your
destination page. Set this step to Required and you’ve added this rule! When
you’re done, verify your goal to make sure that you set it up correctly.
7. Click Save.
You’ve built your first goal in Google Analytics!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your happy
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