Foundation
Campaign tagging helps you accurately track your campaigns in Google Analytics (GA4). You can plan and create tracked links to your site for campaigns across any channel and ensure you are measuring performance against your charity’s objectives.
How campaign tagging works
It is performed by adding parameters (or tags) known as UTM parameters – to the destination URLs you want to use for your charity marketing campaigns. Without these tags, all visitors to your website will appear to come through ‘organic’, ‘referral’ or ‘direct’.
Tagging URLs for campaign tracking can be a tedious task, particularly if you are tagging a large number of URLs. We have created this useful tool that does the hard work for you. We recommend using our spreadsheet as it helps document what has been done and allows for consistency across campaigns, teams and brands etc.
Consistency is key, and using dropdowns rather than free text can minimise human error).
Instructions
1. Input the landing page URL into the ‘Landing URL’ column.
We advise using lowercase letters for all text you input into the URL builder. Google Analytics will treat different cased words differently, so sticking to a consistent format is important.
2. Input the source into the ‘Source’ column. For example: google, newsletter.
3. Input the medium into the ‘Medium’ column. For example: ppc, email.
The text will appear red if an uncommon medium is entered. Common mediums are ppc, cpc, email and social.
4. Input the campaign into the ‘Campaign’ column. For example, summer_news, london_traffic.
5. Input the keyword and ad content for the campaign, if applicable. These are both optional and the keyword dimension is mostly relevant to ppc campaigns.
The ‘ad content’ column can be used to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.
6. Take the ‘Final URL’ that has been created if it appears green and test it in a browser to check you land on the correct page of the site.
The ‘Final URL’ will appear green if the mandatory fields have been completed.
You can download the template below, save it and then edit it for your own campaigns.
