In our last video, we talked about direct traffic and why it’s something you need to pay attention to. Unknowingly, you’re probably adding to your direct traffic by not properly using the Google Campaign URL Builder. The Campaign URL Builder needs to be used in almost any type of outside marketing in which you’re driving traffic to your website.

When to Use the Google URL Campaign Builder

First, the only point where you wouldn’t use the Campaign URL Builder is if you had some natural inbound links to your website.  Additionally, any traffic that’s Google, like Google Display Ads or Google Adwords traffic, will be picked up correctly without the use of the Campaign URL Builder

USE the Campaign URL Builder to track any type of outside marketing like display ads that are NOT Google and these:

• Social ads
• Social posts you place organically
• PDFs you create where you send traffic from that PDF to your website
• Anything where you own the property and you’re driving traffic in by means of another source

This traffic must be directed to Google correctly. Let me show you how to do that.

Start with the Campaign URL Builder

Use Google Campaign URL Builder to tag your entire site or any part of your site that you would promote through any kind of social post or other outside marketing as discussed above.

To make it easy, click here to get the Campaign URL Builder tagging tool. You can access the tool from my website under Digital Marketing Tools. I have created a tool for you to copy into your own Google Drive and use for your team, so you’re sure you get all these URLs. I’ll explain how to use this tool in just a little bit. Right now, let’s look at how you would create a URL.

How to Create a URL

Let’s use a live example. I would like to track how many people get to my site from a Google post.

This is something new Google came up with within the last couple of months, so I’d like to see the value of it. When people click here, they’re going to be brought to my website and that’s what I’m tracking.  I’m using the Campaign URL Builder and I’m controlling how that traffic comes into my Google Analytics, so I am able to track the action of someone clicking on the Google post. Let’s walk through how I did that.

Using our example of tracking traffic from a Google post, fill out the fields in the builder. Here are the steps within the corresponding video.

1. Get the URL of the page you want to track and put it in the Campaign URL Builder. You can access the Campaign URL Builder from here or the tool I shared earlier.
2. Determine the Source. The Source is where the traffic comes from. Where it is found on the internet. Note that entries you make are case-sensitive. Watch 5:15
3. Determine the Medium. Medium is the type of traffic like the type of advertisement. In our example, I named the Google post a social medium. Email, banner ads, affiliates, ebooks with links in them are all examples of mediums. The big ones to consider are email and social. Note: be consistent when naming the medium. For example, Social and social would be counted twice. Next, convert the big link into a shorter link.

What to do with a Shortened URL

Note, if you’re using a different shortener like Bit.ly, you could take that ugly URL, throw it into Bit.ly and then shorten it. However, it makes more sense to use the shortener Google provides. Plus, it’s easier to track inside of Google Analytics than have to look at another platform such as Bit.ly.

Now we can take the shortened URL and use it the Google post. The is a trackable link that I will be able to see in Google Analytics. I will be able to track that back to the source (Google) and I know the medium (social) and now I can slice and dice this data as I like.

That is how to correctly use the Campaign URL Builder. Again, any type of organic paid posts that you are placing out there, emails that you are doing, you need to make sure that you’re using the Campaign URL Builder, otherwise, you are building up your direct traffic and we want to try to reduce that bucket as much as we can.