... for Google Analytics Tracking. Modern marketing demands a social media presence and there are many companies who do a good job of engaging their customers in conversation on sites such as facebook and twitter. However, there are times when you may wish to move this conversation to your own site by getting your fans or followers to click on links.
You can track the number of people who click on your links by using a URL shortener but what happens if you wish to track conversions from these social media campaigns? This question led us to the discovery of an article by Hendry Lee that explains how Google's URL Builder can be used for this exact purpose. Check it out for the technical details or just follow the instructions below so that you can begin to measure social media marketing effectiveness more accurately today!
Instructions from Hendry's article:
- Create a landing page, intermediary pages, and goal page. If your web content management system doesn’t include the Google Analytics tracking code on those pages, you should insert it on every page manually.
- Setup funnels and goals. A funnel is a series of pages through which a visitor must pass before conversion. A goal is the destination page a visitor must land on to assume conversion.
- Tag the landing page with source, medium, and campaign tags.
- Shorten the URL. Use the above tool to speed this up. It allows you to do the third and fourth steps with one click.
- Use the short URL in your tweets.
Steps 1 & 2 have to be completed in order to track conversions. Steps 3, 4 and 5 are performed using one of the bookmarklets below.
Drag the links below to your bookmarks toolbar to create a bookmarklet. You then use this bookmarklet to add a Campaign Name to each link that you generate in order to track it via Google Analytics.
The service is applicable to a variety of URL shortening services.
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Once you begin to tag your links with source, medium and campaign tags you can measure how successful they are by going to the following section in your Google Analytics account: