This includes email marketing, social media advertising, content creation and distribution, etc. To effectively manage each of these channels, you’ll have to closely measure their performance. That's where Google's Campaign URL builder comes in.
What is Google’s Campaign URL Builder?
Simply put, this free tool from Google takes any URL from your website, home page or other landing page and adds tracking information to the end of it so that when you analyze your web traffic, you can easily see what channels visitors came from, and what specific campaign performed best..
Let's take a look at a couple of examples on how to use the Campaign Builder
When you put your website URL in your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) your analytics will display any traffic generated from your Google Business Profile as traffic simply from “Google” - meaning you will not be able to see how many of your visitors come from your Google Business Profile vs any of the other search engine results page elements.
In addition, when you run an ad campaign, you would not be able to tell which ad campaign generated which visitors, and which of those visitors had the highest engagement.
Check out this illustration on how to use the Google Campaign URL Builder.
In the first box, enter or copy/paste the URL that you want to send visitors to. If you are running an ad, copy the campaign ID and enter into the second box. The third box, “campaign source” is where the traffic is coming from.
In the example above, we touched on using Google URL Campaign Builder with your Google Business Profile. Let’s see how this looks in practice. Reference the image below.
Steps
1) In the campaign source box enter “GBP_Listing”. This stands for “Google Business Profile Listing”.
2) In the campaign medium box enter “organic”. This just means that visitors using this link came from a Google search page.
These two entries will prompt Google Analytics to categorize the visitors as coming from organic search results, which is where your public Google Business Profile listing lives., It will also help you to identify which visitors from Google are coming from your GBP listing versus the other organic results in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Note: use all lowercase when you enter “organic” for your medium – that’s Google Analytics default channel value for organic search engine traffic.
The two values combined with the original URL entered in the Campaign URL Builder Create a custom link that includes the tracking codes attached to the end of the URL. This URL is what you will put in your Google Business Profile, so that Google will know that anyone visiting your site that clicked on this URL came from your Google Business Profile.
Original URL: https://cruxdata.io
New URL: https://cruxdata.io/?utm_source=GBP_listing &utm_medium=organic
To use your new URL with modified tracking codes in your Google Business Profile, simply place the new URL where your original URL was.
Adding tracking parameters to a URL provides very insightful and actionable data where there are multiple links from the same platform on your website, such as on certain social media platforms, different advertising campaigns or email newsletters.