*** NOTE: ALL INFORMATION IS ACCURATE AT DATE OF PUBLISHING ***
When you’ve created your content and you share it out in various places, are you tracking where you share it? How many of the visits to a blog post came from your tweet about it vs. how many came from the post you shared on LinkedIn? What about sharing it in a newsletter via email, or even in a WhatsApp group? Google has an awesome tool available in Google Analytics Demos & Tools called the Campaign URL Builder. We can use it to track custom campaigns in Google Analytics. Let’s take a look at how to use this free tool.
First, go to https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/ – then click on the Campaign URL Builder in the Demos & Tools section.
This is so easy to use, you simple need to fill out some fields. First, what link on your website are you sharing? I decided to set up a custom campaign to track the promotion of my Google Analytics Series, so used the link to the sign up landing page on my site. The Campaign Source is where you are going to post the link. So in the example below, I’m creating a custom link that I am going to share on YouTube. The Campaign Medium is the method you are using to share, so for YouTube it’s social. I might also share it on an email which would be the medium for the campaign source of newsletter. Finally, the Campaign Name. Keep this the same for each new link you build. You don’t need to add a Campaign Term or Campaign Content, so these will be left blank.
The link will be composed at the bottom as you add in the various pieces of information. It can end up being a pretty long link, and not all that pretty really, but we can convert the URL to a short link using a Bitly account. If you don’t have one, they are quick and free to set up. Once created, you can authorise your account and then convert it to a short link.
Now I’ve got a nice short generated campaign URL. I can then copy it and use in the source I assigned to the link.
So here we can see the link I generated for YouTube in the description of one of my videos on YouTube.
Now in Google Analytics, we can access the Campaigns area under the Acquisition section. From here, we click on All Campaigns. I can see the Campaign I created called google_analytics. Clicking on this we can dig in to the details.
I can now see the visits I’ve had for the links related to the custom campaign. We can see all of the different related mediums for the ‘social’ source.
The link is still tracked in all of the other analytics sections on it’s own, but now we have the unique custom campaign where we can really dig in to the results for that one specific link.
I will be using this feature a lot more, especially when I am launching something new, like a new course, or some other kind of project. Hope you have fun creating your own custom campaigns!
Want to just watch how to do this? Check out the video: https://youtu.be/ri3B3FEvZ1w
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Amazing I have been looking for this for days!! Thank you Megan ()
Excellent, glad it helped Sara!
Thanks for your post – I seem to be missing something. DO I need to create a new campaign first or does entering a new campaign name in the URL builder accomplish this?
Hi Garett, adding the Campaign Name would add that to Google Analytics as a campaign – but ONLY once at least one person has clicked on one of your links that includes that Campaign Name. Hope that makes sense!