MARKETING AND WEBSITE ANALYTICS Part I
It goes without saying that almost all businesses have a digitally advertised website that they use to engage with current and prospective customers. If done correctly, digital advertising can be a very effective and cost efficient tool for generating qualified leads and maintaining and engaged user base. But how do you know if you’re using it correctly?
In Part 1 of this two-part series, we will talk about three things you can do to take your web and marketing analytics to the next level. We will go over Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and UTM Parameters. In part 2, we will go into details of goal setting and attribution.
This article is not a tutorial, but rather a description of how each of these solutions help answer specific business questions and their ability to influence marketing spend and strategy. Links to resources that will help the reader setup the tools discussed are provided at the end of this article. So, let’s get started!
I. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is probably the most well-known and widely used tool for web analytics. Among other things, Google Analytics provides an easy to use analysis of a website’s traffic and engagement data. There are two versions of Google Analytics, one that’s paid and one that’s free, that differ mainly in the advanced features available to users. For the purpose of this article, we won’t need to worry about the paid version. Setting up Google Analytics is pretty straightforward.
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Sign up for Google Analytics. You can use your existing Gmail credentials to sign in without having to create a new login.
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Link your website to the Google analytics account.
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Set up the appropriate view for reporting. This includes specifying filters for what you see in the reports such as a specific geographic area or excluding traffic from IP addresses associated with your company.
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Finally, Google Analytics will automatically generate a small piece of JavaScript code. Copy the code and paste it right after the tag on each page of your website.
Once set up, you can start to gain insights into your website’s traffic and engagement through the Google Analytics interface. Google Analytics has a wide range of built-in metrics that can be used to understand the volume and quality of traffic such as sessions, pageviews, bounce rate, etc.
II. Google Tag Manager
Once you’ve set up Google Analytics, you can take the web analytics insights to the next level with the help of Google Tag Manager. Before we talk about Google Tag Manager, let’s spend a few minutes understanding what Tags and Triggers are. Don’t be intimidated by the next two paragraphs: While we will talk about the technical details of Tags and Triggers, Google Tag Manager abstracts all these details out and provides a very simple interface to manage and implement various tags.
At a high level, a Tag is a piece of code, often JavaScript or HTML, that communicates information about a user on the website to an external tool, such as Google Analytics, or advertising platforms, like Google AdWords or Facebook. The information generated may be used to identify the user for ad retargeting, to know whether the user purchased something on the website, and to understand the specifics of an action they took on the website (such as link clicking and a variety of other behaviors).
A Trigger is the condition on which the code in the Tag is executed. For example, the Trigger for firing Tags that track user activity on a website may be defined by a click, or a certain amount, say 50%, of scrolling down on a page. Similarly, Triggers for tracking user flow through an e-commerce checkout experience may be defined by the loading of each page in the checkout process (pages for adding payment info and shipping details, for instance).
Google Tag Manager is a tool that lets us easily implement and manage tags on our website without having to get into the details of JavaScript or HTML code. Using the Google Tag Manager’s interface, we can easily define a Tag and a corresponding Trigger to capture the various interactions a user has on our website.
Setting up Google Tag Manager, like Google Analytics, is quite easy.
- Sign Up for Google Tag Manager. You may use the same login as your Google Analytics Account without having to create a new account.
- Create and Install a new Container. The instructions provided by Google Tag Manager can be followed step by step to set this up.
- Once the account and container are up, you are all set to start adding and modifying various types of tags to your website.
Here are a couple of examples of tags that can considerably enhance the data you can get to improve the effectiveness of your marketing.
- Scroll Depth tag – This tag can be used to track what percentage of your site’s visitors have scrolled passed a certain threshold, say 50%, of the page. This information can prove extremely useful in determining how your content is performing. Are visitors reading your blog? Which articles are being read the most? How long should a blog ideally be to keep users engaged? A scroll depth tag can help you go about answering these types of questions.
- Ad Platform tags – These are tags provided by the various channels you run ads on such as facebook, instagram or twitter. Some ad platforms call these tags pixels since they are implemented as images that are as small as a single pixel. These tags let the ad platforms gather data on who is visiting your site and give you the ability to retarget visitors to your site with ads that can drive them to your desired conversion such as purchasing a product or signing up for a subscription on your site.
The links to instructions on how to set these tags up in Google Tag Manager are provided at the bottom of this article.
III. UTM Parameters
Now that we’ve set up Google Analytics and the two Tags using Google Tag Manager, let’s see how we can get insights into which of our ads or campaigns are driving the highest quality traffic as measured by the specific interactions we want users to have with our website.
This can be accomplished using UTM parameters. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module and was introduced by a company, Urchin Software Corporation, that was eventually acquired by Google. Urchin’s web analytics software became Google Analytics after the acquisition.
UTM Parameters are simple variables and values appended to the end of a URL that allows Google Analytics to collect details about what drove traffic to a website. There are 5 UTM parameters: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content. They can each take any alphanumeric value of your choice. One may use one or more of these parameters to append to the URL; however, it’s important for an organization to have a convention for setting UTM parameters. For example, utm_source is the name of the ad platform (google, facebook, etc.), utm_medium is the type of the platform (such as social, cost per click, etc.), and utm_campaign is a description or name of the campaign.
Let’s go through an example. Say you are running a 50% Off promotion on Facebook and on Google’s display network. In the Facebook campaign where you specify which URL to send traffic to, you would use: www..com?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=50off
while for the Google campaign you would use: www..com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=50off
When users click on either of these links to reach your website, Google Analytics will automatically read the values of the UTM parameters you’ve specified and categorize the traffic accordingly.
Once captured by Google Analytics, we can easily see traffic driven by each campaign, source, and medium and which is driving the highest level of engagement with the site, or which is leading to most conversions as measured by the scroll depth and event tags we’ve set up.
Thus, with these three easy-to-setup-and-use tools, we can not only track user engagement and behavior on our website, but also understand how effectively our various marketing campaigns are driving the engagement and behavior we want.
Here are links to resources that will help you set up Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and the two Tags we discussed:
Facebook Pixel with Google Tag Manager
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