Tracking campaigns with tagged links

You sponsor a newsletter, appear on a podcast, post on two social channels and email your own list, all in the same two weeks. Sign-ups go up. Which of those efforts worked? Without some way of labeling the traffic, your analytics will lump most of it together as social, referral or direct, and you will be left guessing where to spend your time and money next.

Tagged links solve this. By adding a few labels to the end of a link, you tell your analytics exactly where a visitor came from, down to the specific newsletter and the specific button they clicked. It costs nothing and takes minutes, but only if you do it consistently.

How a tagged link works

A tagged link is your normal page address with a short set of labels added after a question mark. When someone clicks it, your analytics reads the labels and files the visit under them. Most analytics tools recognize the same five standard labels, each starting with a short shared prefix; your tool's help pages or its free link builder will show the exact spelling.

• Source: who sent the visitor, such as the name of a newsletter, podcast or website.
• Medium: the type of channel, such as email, social, podcast, print or paid.
• Campaign: the promotion or project the link belongs to.
• Content: which version or placement, used when one campaign has several links in the same place.
• Term: mainly used for paid search keywords. Most membership owners can leave it out.

Source, medium and campaign are the essentials. Content is worth adding whenever you want to compare two versions, such as a photo post against a video post.

Agree a naming convention before your first link

Analytics treats every different spelling as a different thing. To your analytics, Email, email and e-mail are three separate mediums, and your report splinters. A short written convention prevents this:

• Use lowercase only, with hyphens instead of spaces.
• Keep a fixed list of mediums, perhaps email, social, podcast, partner, paid and print, and never invent new ones on the fly.
• Name sources after the sender, not the platform alone, so you can tell two newsletters apart.
• Give each campaign one name, used everywhere, that you will still understand a year from now.
• Never put personal information such as email addresses or names into a tag.

Keep a tagging log

A simple spreadsheet saves you from rebuilding links from memory. Give each link a row with these columns: date created, campaign, source, medium, content, the full tagged link, where it was used and what it cost. When a partner asks for a link, copy it from the log. When results come in, the cost column lets you work out what each channel really delivered.

What to tag, and what not to

Tag links that live in places you do not control or that analytics cannot identify on its own: partner newsletters, sponsored newsletter placements, podcast show notes, social posts and profiles, paid ads and your own email newsletters.

For spoken and printed mentions, where no one will type a long address, set up a short, memorable address on your own site that forwards to the tagged link, such as a page named after the podcast. For print, a scannable code pointing to the tagged link works the same way.

Never tag links between pages on your own site. A tag on an internal link overwrites the original source, so a visitor who arrived from search and clicked your tagged menu banner would be counted as coming from the banner. Your search traffic would appear to shrink for no real reason.

A worked example

Take a hypothetical online community for recreational scuba divers, run by an instructor named Callum. He launches a free guide to wreck diving, with the campaign name wreck-guide, and promotes it four ways. The figures are invented to illustrate. After 30 days, his analytics shows:

• Source dive-travel-letter, medium partner: a $400 sponsored slot. 900 visits, 120 guide downloads, 9 new members.
• Source reef-talk, medium podcast: a free interview, with a short address read out on air. 150 visits, 40 downloads, 6 new members.
• Medium social, content photo: 350 visits, 20 downloads, 1 new member.
• Medium social, content video: 250 visits, 35 downloads, 3 new members.
• Medium email, his own list: 500 visits and 10 new members, though these people were already subscribers.

The sponsored slot cost $400 ÷ 9, about $44 per new member, which Callum can compare with what a member is worth to him. The podcast sent far fewer visitors, but 6 of its 150 joined, a much higher rate than the newsletter's 9 of 900. And the video post outperformed the photo post on every measure despite fewer visits, which shapes his next social campaign. To see these as members rather than just visits, the conversions need to be recorded in analytics first, as covered in setting up goals and conversions.

Remember what tags cannot see

Tags only work when people click the tagged link. A listener who hears the podcast and later types your main address will appear as direct traffic, and someone who forwards the partner newsletter may arrive untagged. Treat tagged results as a solid lower estimate, and add a short how-did-you-hear question at sign-up to catch what the tags miss.

Getting started with tagged links

1. Write your naming rules and fixed list of mediums on one page.
2. Create a tagging log with a row for every link.
3. Tag every link in your next external promotion, including your own newsletter.
4. Set up short forwarding addresses for anything spoken or printed.
5. Check your analytics a day after launch to confirm the tags appear correctly spelled.
6. After 30 days, compare visits, sign-ups and cost per member by source, and decide where the next campaign's effort goes.