How well do G.A. utm Campaigns play together?

[SmileMoreSEO]

Hello!

Here's my situation. In the coming days I will have two sources of Google Analytics utm Campaigns running:

• Source 1 is paid online advertising.
• Source 2 will be banner ads on our own website that encourage people to request an appointment with the dentist whose profile page they're viewing. (With close to 100 doctors, that's a LOT of Campaigns URLs, but I fell it will be worth it to know where appointment requests are coming from.)

So, the question... Let's say a site visitor arrives to our site via one of our paid ad's utm Campaigns URL. What happens if that visitor navigates to one of our dentist's profile page then clicks the banner ad that also contains a utm URL. Which Campaign gets the credit for the goal conversion? The most recent (the banner)? The original source (the paid ad)? Both?

Thanks in advance for any insight!

Erik

[SmileMoreSEO]

Thank you, everyone, for your response. Looks like I need to dig into Event Tracking!

Erik

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I agree with Federico on this, always try to prevent using the UTM tags on  your own site. It's the start of making your Analytics account unbearable after a while. The best alternative for this is to mark your banners with Event Tracking, by doing this you're able to segment them and use all the advantages of UTM tags without all the negative sides like messing up the conversion attribution.

[FedeEinhorn]

I wouldn't use a utm_campaign within banners in my own site. Even with paid advertising, sometimes you don't need to use those variables as GA is intelligent enough to recognize the source as paid/organic.

Let's say you advertise on Twitter, AdWords and Bing. GA automatically recognizes AdWords traffic, no need of utm_campaign there; on the other hand you do need to set those variables to differentiate from paid/organic from twitter and bing.

Once you have a Goal created in GA, you can check the Goal Flow and see from where are they coming. You can even set steps inside GA and track the pages that the users browse before converting.

Also, if you send ecommerce data to GA, you will be able to track the sources that produce better income, etc., by using the ecommerce (as you book doctor appointments, you can look at the appointment requested as a "sale") and then take advantage of the all the ecommerce data.

[Bonx]

Hi Erik,

I think the best solution for this is to create landing pages (incl. forms) whereby all traffic is directed to complete the lead (conversion). With this you just need to setup a landing page where the client can choose the doctor and fill in their personal details. The conversion comes after the details have been submitted (so the goal for this should be setup on GA). By doing this you can see your source and path of conversion on GA.

Also you will need to structure this right. For example:

• Traffic coming from paid should go directly to the landing page thats content is relevant to the source. Example: An ad about free withdrawals from a specific bank (this content / copy targets a specific banking audience). The landing page content describes how and why these saving are possible (in bullet form / short sentences).

• The banners on your own site will be easy to track because the url embedded inside them link through to the landing page (Source and Path will be shown in GA)

Regards,

Rickus