Campaign tracking

When tracking a paid, social or email campaign it is best to tag links with parameters that allow website analytics tools to better report on how the campaign performed. When you do this the URL will look like this: https://www.example.com/?utm_source=summer-mailer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=summer-sale

You can set up your link parameters using this tool: Campaign URL Builder

From Google’s help page, the essential parameters are utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign: URL builders: Collect campaign data with custom URLs

• utm_source Referrer, for example: google, newsletter, billboard
• utm_medium Marketing medium, for example: cpc, banner, email
• utm_campaign Product, slogan, promo code, for example: spring_sale

We also recommend adding the parameters to any short or ‘vanity’ redirects. For our sites that means adding a redirect from a friendly URL that can be included on something like a print or TV advert (for example, mygov.scot/renters) which then gets redirected in the back-end of our CMS to a URL which has the tracking code attached, for example:

https://www.mygov.scot/private-rental-rights?utm_source=shorturl&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=renters_rights

Ideally any paid advertising ads would be consistently tagged.  In Google Ads this can be done through templates which can be set via the account settings "tracking" section. 

{lpurl}?utm_source={network}&utm_medium=cpc&utm_id={campaignid}&ad_group_id={a
dgroupid}&ad_id={creative}&placement_id={placement}&gclid={gclid}