Tracking Anything with Google Analytics |
6/18/08 - 8am |
You can track anything in Google Analytics by simply appending UTM information to the urls of your site. Not hard to do, but there does seem to be very little information concerning it.
For example, to track Google Product Search append this to all of your urls:
?utm_source=Google-Product-Search&utm_medium=organic
making your final url:
http://www.example.com/product1.html?utm_source=Google-Product-Search&utm_medium=organic
You can stick anything in the utm_source and medium sections, but it helps to keep these in a similar format as all of your other analytics data. We also do this for our MSN & Yahoo PPC campaigns:
http://www.example.com/product1.html?utm_source=msn&utm_medium=cpc
http://www.example.com/product1.html?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc
(Make sure the “yahoo” & “cpc” sections are lowercase or Analytics will not recognize them as search engines.)
Simply insert this text as your ad links in your campaigns. (You don’t have to do this with Google Adwords as Google automatically handles the CPC differentiation for Analytics Data.)
You don’t even have to generate these urls yourself. Checkout the Google UTM URL Builder.
It goes without saying, the more you can track & differentiate your data, the more informed decisions you can make.
