Tagging URLs

Guide on Tagging up your Campaign URLS

Tagging up your URLs will allow Ruler to report some extra insight about the Marketing Source generating your visits and conversions to your site.

Having the extra parameters on your final urls will allow you to make more informed decisions about your marketing efforts and give you the opportunity to compare the success of each within your Ruler Analytics Dashboard.

Ruler recognises the standard utm and value track parameters such as

utm_source=

utm_medium=

utm_campaign=

utm_term=

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NOTE

It is imperative that you test each URL to make sure it works with your site as your site may rely on variables in the URL already. If your site URL already includes a ?variable you will need to use a &variable.

For instance if your URL looked like this: www.yourwebsite.com/?cat=10&prod=20

You would add:

www.yourwebsite.com/?cat=10&prod=20&utm_source=google&utm_medium=ppc&utm_term={keyword}

The golden rule is to check your URLs for each type you set-up.

Google Ads

While Ruler still recommends you keep auto-tagging enabled, unlike Bing, Google Ads does not provide the utms to the final URL automatically. You will need to manually tag up your URLs to get the extra insight into your Ruler dashboard.

There are a few options for this.

1 - Valuetrack Parameters

We find the easiest method to get utms on your final URL is via the tracking template in Google Ads editor.

Shared library > URL Options > Tracking Template and paste in the following;

{lpurl}?utm_term={keyword}&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc

Or for the New Ads view

Settings > Account Settings > Tracking Template and paste in the following;

{lpurl}?utm_term={keyword}&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc

Press save and make sure Auto-Tagging is turned on as well.

This will collect the Source, Channel and the Keyword from Google Ads.

There are a few different parameters you can dynamically insert via your tracking template, please note Campaign name is not a parameter that can be dynamically inserted via the tracking template. This will need to be manually entered for each final URL.

More information on Value Track Parameters can be found here

2 - Manually tagging your Final URLs

While the tracking template can insert many insightful parameters there are a few things you cannot insert such as the Campaign Name.

This has to be manually inserted on each of your final URLs within Adwords Editor.

Google has a free to use URL builder which can help you create your final URL with your desired UTMs.

https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/

More information on capturing Campaign data via Manual tagging can be found here

Bing Paid

As long as auto tagging is enabled within your Bing Paid account, Bing will provide the utm parameters to your final URLs automatically and you will not need to manually insert them to the URL.

Details on how to ensure auto-tagging is enabled in your Bing account can be found here - https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/post/june-2014/auto-tagging-of-destination-urls-in-bing-ads

Facebook

Ruler can detect Facebook traffic within the platform. However, without UTMs on the URLs there is no way for Ruler to distinguish clicks from paid and organic Facebook marketing.

As with Google Ads you can use the standard UTM parameters with Facebook Paid ads.

More information can be found here

Facebook has its own URL builder you can use to assist.

Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin

As with Facebook, you will need UTMs in place to be able to tell a paid click from an organic click within your Ruler dashboard.

Some Paid social platforms will allow you to add dynamic tracking to your URLs such as Hootsuite.

However, you can also add the URLs in manually using Google's URL builder to help you compose your final URL.

While a link on your social media with a ton of UTM parameters may not be so appealing for a perspective lead to click you on you can use short URLs to make your URL look less intimidating.

Email

Email works in the same way as Social Media With the nature of e-mail software you could add specific references for the email, the different links in the email and even the email address.

utm_source – email
utm_source – email
utm_term – if applicable you can use this as a unique reference such as the email address
utm_campaign – if applicable newsletter-month, segment1
utm_content – if applicable e.g. product, special offer
e.g.

http://www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&[email protected]&utm_content=welcome-email

Some useful Short URL create sites can be found below;

https://bitly.com/

https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/