PharmiMike

As a digital marketer, you will end up with logins and passwords for a lot of sites!! You may think at the time that you will remember that you used the cats maiden name for your password, but believe me, you wont. So, have a system. I use a spreadsheet that I constantly refer to. Simple but effective. 

You will find that an increasing number of sites use OpenID logins, which essentially allow you to login to multiple sites by sharing information. Twitter does this, blogger and numerous others. The frustrating thing is Google’s openID is not the same or compatible with Yahoo’s etc etc. Yawn.

Its vitally important that you know which bits of your digital marketing campaigns are reaping rewards, therefore you need to track things. Luckily, if you are using Google Analytics for your website analytics package (and you should be), then you can do this.

The answer my friend is in Google UTM codes. Urchin Tracking Monitor codes to you and me (geeklink).. essentially by adding a simple bit on the end of any link back to your website, you can track which campaign was the source. Its up to you to define your campaigns.

For example:

http://www.pharmimike.com/?utm_source=s_site&utm_medium=Mailshot&utm_campaign=New-Product-launch

Useful tool here: Google Analytic UTM URL Builder.

Google’s Own Tool here:

From this extra information Google Analytics can log the campaigns, and you can see which one is working and which one is not.

For example, I use UTM codes on the end of links within Job adverts I place in a number of LinkedIn groups. A different code for each group. That way I can see which groups give me good return on my time investment. If I relied solely on the normal stats, I’d simply get a load of clicks logged from LinkedIn without knowing which group they came from .

The only disadvantage you may notice is the resulting length of the URL, which is no good for Twitter for example, so its worth using a URL shortener such as Ti.ny or Bit.ly

A useful tool for this is a plugin for Firefox called snip-n-tag. as this adds the codes for you and generates a short URL with the result.

Its a good idea to keep track of the codes you use in a spreadsheet or database, otherwise you will soon lose track. Log the date used and the code in your spreadsheet, and you can review your analytics logs with this in mind to made informed decisions about your campaign success rate.