Using Google URL Parameters to Better Track the Effectiveness of Social Media

If you are a looking to track the impact of social media for generating leads, customers, donations, volunteers, etc., then source coding your URLs is a must. URL shorteners are good for telling you how many clicks you received on a given link, but that is only part of the story. Appending URL parameters onto links you share on Twitter, Facebook, etc., will really help you measure what social media channels are generating the highest results and what messaging is working where.

For those unfamiliar with URL parameters, they are “codes” you can add to the end of a URL, so when someone clicks on a link your website analytics package stores those codes and relates them to that visit. That way, you can search within your web analytics software for all visits to your site that had a specific source code attached to the URL and see how many people came to the site, what pages how long they stated, if they converted on a form, etc.

As an example, you may add a source code of “email030111” to your URL. When you go into Google Analytics and view content analytics, you can filter and sort your stats based on various source codes as seen in the pic below.

There are a number of web analytics packages available with their own custom URL parameters, but for the sake of this post, we are going to focus on Google’s URL parameters. If you are not familiar with how to add parameters to a URL, you should check out Google’s URL Builder. You can drop in the URL you want to append the parameters to, enter the parameters in each field, and Google will generate the field for you.

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Hootsuite, our preferred social media management tool, has a built in tool for adding parameters to URLs. When you enter a URL you want to shorten, a drop-down will appear to the right of the URL. Click that drop down and select “Custom URL Parameters”. You will see another drop-down in the pop-up that reads “Select a Preset”. Click that drop down and select “Google Analytics”. The parameter fields should now be populated with Google Analytics URL parameters.

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There are three parameter options that Hootsuite provides you: utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign. Below is a description of each:

utm_source: This is the source code for your specific message. Naming conventions for source codes are a matter of preference. Using a combination of a unique identifier for the message and date, i.e. promoA020111, can make identifying the date and purpose of the campaign much easier when you reference codes in Google Analytics.

utm_medium: This allows you to track the method by which your email was sent out. So, you want to identify the medium as channels such as email, SMS, Twitter, etc. I try to not use the name of the tool that sends the message, such as Hootsuite, as a medium because online communications tools generally allow you to send messages to multiple channels.

utm_campaign: This code corresponds to the campaign you are running across multiple channels. This is a good way to group messages sent related to one marketing effort over a period of time.

After entering the parameters and the URL, Hootsuite will generate a URL with the parameters appended, which can them be shortened using either Ow.ly or Ht.ly.

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If you have integrated Hootsuite with you Google Analytics account, you will now be able to Menu > Stats > Site Analytics to access your website stats from within Hootsuite. There are three filters, as seen below, which will allow you to see stats from a specific source code, medium, or campaign.

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How are you using URL parameters to track the success, or failures, of your social media program?