Tracking your Campaigns
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.
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.
