I recently ran an e-mail campaign with a partner, who sent me over a URL with their own UTM parameters so they could track performance on their side.
When I handed the information over to our e-mail team and checked as the campaign went live, it appeared that they, out of habit, had added their own UTM parameters on top of the ones sent over by the partner, resulting in a click-through URL that looked like the following -
http://spirit.cruises.com/?cm_mmc=partner_email-_-sprt-multi_product--20161028--clia_plan_a_cruise_month&utm_medium=partner_email**&utm_source**=sprt-multi_product**&utm_campaign**=20161028&utm_content=clia_plan_a_cruise_month**&utm_source**=responsys**&utm_medium**=email**&utm_campaign**=20161028_50pct__Dual_Cruise_Email
As you can see, there are duplicate source, medium, and campaign parameters.
Does anyone know what happens in this situation? Does Google Analytics count both, or just the first, or just the last, or none? What is best practice when there are two parties that want to track performance of a URL in a campaign, and they may have different naming conventions?
(This is my first question, so please be nice :) Thanks!)
GA counts the last set. The proper way to deal with this is to avoid the situation. Email Software is often set to automatically add utm parameters to links (do you do not have to do it manually), but then all email marketing software I know would allow to override the configured default parameters.
I am not sure how your partner could track performance "on their site" via utm parameters unless they have their own GA code integrated in your website (or do you mean that they have access to your GA ?).
If there are two sets of analytics code that require different campaign attribution you would have use differently named parameters - let's say utm_medium2, utm_source2 and utm_campaign2 - and manually override campaign attribution for the second tracker:
// add this to after your usual tracker
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto', 'partnerTracker');
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignName',<value of utm_campaign2>)
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignMedium',<value of utm_medium2>)
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignSource',<value of utm_source2>)
ga('partnerTracker.send','pageview')
That would send data to a second account and override campaign attribution fields. It seems quite unlikely that you have or want that, but if you want to allow your partner to independently track utm values on your website (and everything else with it) that would the way to go.
Frankly I think you should just remove your partners utm parameters. Utm parameters make only sense for the owner of the respective GA account, and that is probably you, not the partner.
I agree with the first answer except for that last point where has says to remove the partner's UTM parameters.
In your case, the destination for the link provided to you by your partner is NOT your own website. The link goes to your partner's website. Therefore, your GA account has zero relationship with the link he sent you.
The way we're getting around this (without doing anything in analytics) for our many partners that we send links to is by using different email subjects per partner. Most email platforms use the subject line (or the internally defined Campaign "Name") as the value for UTM_Campaign.
So different subjects that include the partner organization in them:
"Special discount for ABC Organization members!"
"Special discount for XYZ Company members"
We can then analyze each unique campaign name in GA.
Related
I am trying to get to a point where I can identify visitors who are generating website Goals. And identifying them via their Pardot ID-s in GA.
Do you think that's possible?
On the site every visitor gets a Pardot cookie and in that there is a readable Visitor ID which via an API query can be turned into a Pardot ID.
But how can this piece of information get stitched to the rest of the GA parameters? How to push this into GA as a custom data point so I can create a report on who are the Pardot IDs that completed a certain goal this week?
Is there any guidance you can give?
Assuming, that Pardot ID itself is not a Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in terms of Google Analytics, there are several ways to accomplish this.
You could provide this data as User ID, which helps Google Analyitcs to identify users across several browsers and devices. However, this dimension is not exposed on the reporting GUI or the reporting API. (Available dimensions and metrics can be browsed here.)
Instead, or in parallel, you could store this information in a custom dimension, which, can be used in standard or custom reports, or via the reporting API as well. There a couple of things to consider. According to the Measurement Protocoll reference, the maximum length of this field is 150 bytes. You should also decide, if this dimension is most useful for your needs and possibilities on hit, session or user level, about which you can read here.
I have a requirement where I need to track whether a user clicked a link in a PDA email where the link included in the email is >900 characters.
I'm not sure if Google analytics support tracking in PDA.
If anyone has ever done this,please help me out.
Thanks
I seem to have misunderstood the question, so here is an update. Google will usually track any valid Urls. The two exceptions I can think of are more theoretical than a practical concerns.
Some old browsers (I think IE6 and similar vintages) have a character limit for GET requests (2048 bytes IIRC), so very long links will not work, and this not be tracked correctly. For all practical purposes these browsers should be extinct by now
A Google Analytics request is limited to 8096 bytes.The request has to transmit the document location as part of the payload, so if your URL is really massively oversizes (technically 8000 characters is ">900") this would not be tracked. Again, this is hardly a practical concern (unless there is a lot of other data, like e.g. Enhanced E-Commerce product impressions in that request).
Old (and probably irrelevant) answer:
Google Analytics does typically not track actions within emails, since email clients do not usually support javascript (there are implementations of email open tracking via "web bugs" linked to a script that does a measurement protocol request, but event that does not work particularly well).
If this is a link that points to your homepage the typical way to track this would be via utm parameters - i.e. you do not track the action within the email itself, but the result (the visit to your homepage).
UTM parameters (or "campaign parameters") are
utm_medium - the kind of traffic (if it's paid advertising, banner ads, or in your case e.mail)
utm_source - the specific vendor (e.g. "google" if the link is from a paid Google Ad, or in your case it could be the name of the department that sent out the mail)
utm_campaign - your advertising campaign; in the case of a periodic newsletter this could be e.g. the number of the newsletter
utm_term - you usually would not use that in an email, that's reserved for when a link is a result of a search (then you would insert the search term)
utm_content - if you have multiple links with the same link target and campaign info you can add additional information (e.g. if you have the same link at the top and the bottom of your mail you could indicate the position here)
You cannot do anything dynamic, though - if you want to mark links with a specific character count you would have to do this within your newsletter programm and insert the number. GA would then be able to pick this up from the campaign parameters.
E.g. for your use case you might construct a target URL like
www.example.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=my_department&utm_campaign=pda_mail&utm_content=<number of characters>
and then get the information from the Aquisition reports in Google Analytics.
If the links do not point to your own homepage you would need to set up an intermediate page that tracks the utm_parameters before it redirects to the intended destination.
I have a goal which detects if someone made a purchase on my website. I want to know where that person came from (adwords, facebook, organic, etc).
The problem is that Analytics tells me the source of all these people is the payment processor. This isn't surprising as the flow looks as follows:
Checkout Page -> Paypal.com -> Payment Success Page
It tells me all my goals came from paypal. I want to know where these people came from originally. How would I do that?
You probably forgot to add the payment processor to the referral exclusion list in the property settings. If you do that it will be ignored as a traffic source and the original channel information will be retained. It will also affect the number of sessions - a change in traffic attribution starts a new sessions, so after the change you should expect somewhat fewer sessions with more pageviews.
Unfortunately the setting is not applied retroactively, so traffic data up until you implement the setting is lost for good.
I have a website that allows people to create an account (that is the conversion I wish to track).
I wish to know where a specific person is coming from. I have google analytics installed and have set up the registration page as a goal, but the reporting tells me traffic sources as an aggregated pie chart. It doesn't report down to the user account level to say that 'person with email xyz' came from 'facebook' for example.
What custom variables or mark up would I need to add to GA to report at that detailed level, if that is at all possible?
Otherwise, I will just have to record the first http_referer in a cookie and stick it in a database during the registration process.
Any advice?
Firstly I must ask you, how actionable do you think it is to look at data at that granular of a level? Finding out what % of people who registered came from facebook or some other place is actionable, because it helps you do things like determine where to focus marketing efforts. But individual users? How is this actionable to you? (hint: it's not)
However, if you are still determined to know this, you should first note that it is against Google's ToS to record personally identifiable data both directly (recording the actual value in GA) or indirectly (e.g. - recording a unique id that you can use to tie to personal info stored within your own system). If this is something you don't want to risk, I suggest moving to another analytics tool that does not have this sort of thing in their ToS (e.g. Adobe SiteCatalyst, which costs money, or perhaps you may instead prefer to choose an "in-house" approach, like Piwik)
If you are still determined to follow through with this and hope not to get caught or whatever, Google Analytics doesn't record data like what info a visitor filled out in a form (like their email address) unless you populate that data in a custom field/dimension/metric/event to be sent along with the request. Usually you would populate this on the form "thank you" page (which is usually the same page you use as your goal url or goal event if you're popping and using an event for your goal). So you would populate the email address in one of those custom variables and then have it as a dimension to break down the http referrer by.
We have some third parties that are sending us traffic and have asked us to put a tracking pixel on the confirmation page so they can track through the sales.
We are currently using Google analytics for our own usage.
Google will remember the original referral through cookies. This may be a good or bad thing. If someone purchases through company B's link but they had originally found our site through company A - then company A still gets the 'referal'. That doesn't seem fair, but it seems to be the way google analytics works:
For example, if this is the user's
first visit to your site, the tracking
code will add the campaign tracking
information to the cookie. If the user
previously found and visited your
site, the tracking code increments the
session counter in the cookie.
Regardless of how many sessions or how
much time has passed, Google Analytics
"remembers" the original referral.
This gives Analytics true
multi-session tracking capability.
Currently we only have one tracking pixel on our 'receipt page' from a company that we're not even doing business with. Having a second company ask me for us to add one makes me thing 'wait a minute - we're going to suddenly be inundated with these things!'. Plus it means someone can look at the source and see all the people we do business with.
This isn't Oprah - you cant ALL have tracking pixels. Right ?
How should we manage sales from multiple traffic sources in the most honest way for both sides - especially if they already have a system set up that they insist on using?
Here's how I solved the problem at our company: we gave our partners a URL that has a parameter in the query string. This parameter triggers a cookie. On the "goal"/confirmation page (where the tracking pixel is usually inserted), we insert some logic to see if the cookie value is correlated with a one of our recognized partners (chained if-else or switch statement). If a match is found, then the tracking pixel is displayed.
Even though you asked this question a while ago, I hope that this still helps you or someone else with the same problem!