Before Your next Marketing Campaign: What Is Google URL Builder?
Thinking of paying for advertising or running an email marketing campaign.
We take a look at what is Google URL Builder and why you should use it.
What is Google URL Builder?
Well...Henry Ford once famously said “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time”, so there’s no surprise in saying that advertising is a vital part of generating new business.
There is of course advertising in Newspapers, magazines, the backs of Buses, TV and Radio which us internet folks call “Offline” and Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Sponsored Listings, Guest Blogging, Affiliate and email marketing those same folks call “Online”.
One of the big differences with Online marketing is traceability. To a certain extent, the measure of effectiveness for offline marketing would be whether the phone seemed to be ringing more, but like all things, things evolve.
Google Analytics is a great free Google tool for websites to track and measure what’s happening on a website, in essence it analyses:
- Audience (Demographics and an insight in to who and how people visited your site)
- Acquisition (how people got to your site)
- Behavior (what people did once they got to your site)
- Conversions (What significant outcomes came as a result of their visit)
Consider this; you’re paying for a listing on a website to advertise your business, let’s imagine this is yell.com, Thomson Local, The Best Of or even an industry specific directory.
How do you track your Return On Investment (ROI)?
Google Analytics can tell you exactly how many visits came from the sites you advertised on (referrals).
So where does Google URL Builder come in?
Let’s imagine you want to go a step further. You have several adverts running on a site of which you’re paying for each and you want to analyse which advert is delivering more traffic?
It’s not just for multiple adverts, but it’s also a great way to separate traffic for a particular source to make it simple to quickly analyse.
Let’s take a look: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
Campaign Source:
In this case the blog, but this could be an email or a Facebook post for example.
Medium:
Again, I've added blog here, but this could be email, PPC and so on.
Campaign Name:
This is the text that will show up in Google Analytics, so choose something that will be easily identifiable, distinct from other campaigns, and not too long.
So what do the results look like?
In true Blue Peter style…”Here’s one we made earlier…”.
Summary:
Google Analytics has always been a great tool to track what’s going on with your website along with how people get to the site first. The URL builder takes things a step further allowing you to segment your data and better understand how your advertising is working.