Tagging Marketing Campaigns & Go Deeper than Vanity Metrics

Tagging Marketing Campaigns & Go Deeper than Vanity Metrics

By David Bird

You work hard at your marketing programs email and advertising campaigns and social media engagement. Your investment and hard work make marketing results important to you.

Your email application, or social media analytics won’t tell how well those activities are contributing to the specific goals like:

  • Sales revenue
  • Leads generated
  • Number of new email subscribers

Zero in on What Gets the Best Marketing Results

Data that links marketing activities to outcomes or goals, can help you make better decisions about where and how to invest your precious marketing time and money. It helps you see what’s sparking your customers’ interests, so you can give them more of what they want.

Applications Don’t Show You Complete Marketing Results

If you’re like most, you’ll turn to your email software, social media analytics and even web tracking software like Google Analytics for marketing performance data. But these applications don’t tell you which activities drove which outcomes.

Unless, of course, you’ve properly tagged the links back to your website.

Without this tagging, it’s almost impossible to get the results and trending information you need to guide your marketing efforts, decision or purchases.

What’s a Link Tag?

A link tag is just a set of instructions that tell Google Analytics or other applications how you want click data stored.

When you send email blasts, publish social media posts, or advertise, you usually include a link back to your website. Embedding a tag in those links organizes the click data in Google Analytics so you can accurately assess the performance of your marketing programs.

The Rules of Link Tags

For Google Analytics to organize you link click data, the tag you embed in the link must contain three elements:

  1. Medium: where you promoted the event (email, social media, affiliate websites, etc.)
  2. Source: more specific information about the medium (the email list name, which social media application (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.), name of the affiliate website
  3. Campaign: The specific product, service or event being promoted.

With a little planning it is easy to apply marketing campaign tags to your next marketing campaign.  In the next post to see examples how tagging marketing campaigns works.

This post is an excerpt of an earlier article posted on Bird’s Eye Marketing.