Beginners Guide to Campaign Tagging

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Social Media Posts
In the normal course of events any visit from a social media site will update Medium with the text “referral” and Source with the domain name of the referring website.  If more detailed information such as which post the visitor came from or who authored it is required you need to use campaign tags.

The capturing of visits from social media sites is a highly configured area of Google Analytics, with Google matching up the visit information to its list of recognised Social Media websites and populating data based on this.

By using campaign tagging you are likely to disrupt this process. But this mainly concerns the reports found in the Acquisition -> Social section of Google Analytics. If you don’t use these, then there is little to be concerned about. If you do, it is best to seek out someone who really understands the in’s and out’s of these reports or carry out tests to see what works and what doesn’t.

The Social sections of the Acquisition->Channels and the Acquisition Treemaps reports also rely on Google’s background data configuration to work properly, but you can avoid the worst problems by using utm_medium=social to ensure that visits from social media sites are correctly categorised as Social in these reports.

It is always worth experimenting to see what works best for you, but the following often proves sufficient:

utm_medium  –  Use utm_medium=social  this ensures the Acquisition Channel and Treemap reports will categorise the visits with all the other Social visits.
utm_source   –  Use the social network name. The best thing to do is copy the value used by GA from an untagged post. There might be several variants, choose any.
utm_content  – Details about the post / author
utm_campaign – Your campaign name

Display ads and referral links from other websites
If any visitor arrives on a website by following a link from another website Google Analytics will normally update Medium with the text “referral” and Source with the domain of the referring website.

The exceptions to this are when campaign tags are used, since it will use these values instead and when the website the referral has come from uses https and the website receiving the referral uses http (although there are exceptions to this exception!).

Using campaign tags can overcome the https problem and also provides a way to capture additional information if required.

The following is a suggestion for a display advert:

utm_medium – Use the text “display”
utm_source – Use the website name
utm_content – Details to identify which advert was used
utm_campaign – Your campaign name

Where not to use campaign tags

Never use campaign tags for internal links.

If you did, once a visitor clicked on them, GA would start a new session with the campaign tag values of the internal link incorrectly increasing the number of sessions recorded.  End-to-end visibility of the visitors journey to and through the website would also be lost. If you need to track internal links over and above the standard use event tracking.

Using a URL Shortener

Campaign tags are fully compatible with URL shorteners such as bitly.com and goo.gl GA records the full URL and not the shortened version.

Always test the URL shortener since some of them will append their own campaign tags overriding yours.

Fixing mistakes in campaign tag data

Unfortunately once data has been uploaded to Google Analytics it cannot be changed. However, it is possible to set up filters to amend data as it is collected, and URL tags that are published with a mistake can often be fixed using these.