Custom URL tracking for paid online ads

[SmileMoreSEO]

Hello!

Our marketing team is testing paid online ad networks (banner ads, mobile ads and video ads) this year in addition to some traditional television advertising.

We would like to track how effective these various ads are, and I'm wondering the best method to do so. In all cases, we're not setting up new pages for these ads to go to. They will simply go to an existing page on our site. For tracking purposes, here's what I'm wondering... If we set up custom URLs on our site (e.g. www.example.com/sports) then have the visitor immediately redirected to the intended page on our site (typically our home page), will Google Analytics show that custom URL in any report to see how much traffic flowed through it? Or will it not register because a page doesn't really exist for that URL?

The biggest issue is with the banner ad network, which targets around ten categories of sites (sports, moms, entertainment, etc.). I know I'll be able to find the network listed as a referrer to see the total traffic the network sent us, but we would like to know specifically which category drove the visits. As such, would a custom URL for each category work, or will Google Analytics not pick it up because it's not hitting an actual page?

For television ads, we are showing our URL as www.example.com/tv, which would then redirect to the intended landing page. In this case, it's a little more challenging because I won't have the referrer traffic to go by. But same problem... will GA recognize that URL and show it in Behavior > Site Content > All Pages?

I hope this makes sense. If not please let me know and I'll try to explain.

Thanks in advance,
Erik

[SmileMoreSEO]

Thanks, John. Great information!

Erik

[john4math]

Dana is spot on with the Google URL builder.  If you're tracking in Google Analytics, this is the way to go.  My favorite report for this is the Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths report. Select "Source/Medium" as your primary dimension, and you'll be able to how conversions are going by whatever utm_source and utm_medium parameters you put into your URLs.  You can add a secondary dimension of Campaign path to see how things are going by utm_campaign.  You can then search by any of those to see when campaigns are driving conversions.  I do that all the time.

So for your banner campaign targeting different categories of sites, if they're all with one provider, I'd set a consistent utm_source and utm_medium, and vary the utm_campaign by the different campaigns you mentioned there as examples (sports, moms, entertainment, etc.).  If you're doing banners through Adwords, you can turn on "auto-tagging" which will automatically tag your ad URLs for you.  See here for more info on that.

The easiest thing to do for TV campaigns is just to have www.example.com/tv redirect to your landing page with the utm parameters on it.  For example, have www.example.com/tv redirect to www.example.com/tvlandingpage?utm_source=tv&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=hulu-ad or something along those lines.  Since people coming from the TV are not being referred to you by another site, you shouldn't lose any referral data with the redirect.

[SmileMoreSEO]

Thanks Dana, that's great!

This should work well for ad campaigns (or Facebook) where the URL isn't visible. Any suggestion for the television example given? Is there a best practice for tracking a URL like that, where it requires the television viewer to physically type it in to their browser?

Thanks again,
Erik

[danatanseo]

Hi Erik,

I believe you can use the Google Analytics URL Builder to accomplish what you want/need to do. Here's a link to Raven's version: http://gaconfig.com/google-analytics-url-builder/  or here's one straight from the source: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

Here is a fabulous Whiteboard Friday presented by Rachel Gerson from SEER Interactive that explains why you want to tag your campaigns and how to do it: http://moz.com/blog/why-google-analytics-tagging-matters-whiteboard-friday

Hope that helps!