Understanding Google URL Builder: 5 Easy Steps

Are you worried that your Ad Campaign may not work at the end of the day? Then, you should use the Google URL Builder to put the situation under control. This free tool tracks your Campaigns’ Performance and Reports, on a daily basis, so that you can determine whether your Campaigns are effective or otherwise.

This is especially crucial when it comes to Paid Marketing activities. If you’re going to spend money, you should know what’s going to provide you with the best results. The Google Analytics URL Builder lets you track campaigns, prove value, and produce insights that help adjust your marketing strategy.

In this article, you will learn about the Google URL Builder, its features, components, benefits, how to use the tool, and its limitations.

Table of Contents

• What is Google URL Builder?
  • Key Components of Google URL Builder
• Benefits of the Google URL Builder
• What is Campaign Tracking in Google Analytics?
• How do I use the Google URL Builder?
• Where do I find my campaigns in Google Analytics?
• Where can I see if my campaigns are converting?
• Steps to use the Google URL Builder
  • Step 1: Access the Google URL Builder
  • Step 2: Insert your Campaign Parameters
  • Step 3: Generate your Tracking URL
  • Step 4: Insert the Tracking Address within the Campaigns
  • Step 5: Analyse Daily Results in Google Analytics
• When to use the Google URL Campaign Builder?
• Limitations of Google URL Builder
• Conclusion

Introduction to Google URL Builder

The Google URL Builder was designed to help Marketers improve the success rate of their Ad Campaigns. With these tools, you can now analyse the daily performance of your Ad Campaigns in your Google Analytics Dashboard rather than waiting, till the last day of the Ad Campaign to analyse the results. 

The Google URL Builder allows you to add a Tracking Code to your URL, and it’s this code that monitors the performance of your Ad Campaigns. This Tracking Code is a combination of your Campaign Parameters and your Campaign URL.

In addition, Google URL Builder is not just for Product Adverts. You can also use the tool to track visits to your Blog. If you are a Blogger who posts links to your Blog on your Social Media pages, the URL Builder will prove just as effective.

This tool is ideal for small businesses that only run a few Ad Campaigns. Since they run a relatively fewer number of Ad Campaigns, they have enough time to insert all the tracking links into the URL Builder. On the other hand, large businesses may consider the tool inefficient. Marketers in large organizations may be unable to input all their details within a short time frame because they have to manage a lot of Campaigns.

The Google URL Builder is a Google Analytics tool. So, when a customer interacts with your Ad, the URL Builder transmits the information to your Google Analytics Dashboard. You, therefore, have to visit the ‘Campaigns’ section in your Google Analytics Dashboard to retrieve the Performance Analysis of your Campaign at the end of each day.

Key Components of Google URL Builder

The Google URL Builder displays your Campaign Parameters as Tags at the end of your URLs. These Tags have five form fields:

• Campaign Source: This is the platform where a customer clicks on a referral link or interacts with your Campaign. Popular examples are Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a Newsletter. If you are running Ads on different platforms, you have to create Tracking URLs for each of the platforms in the Google URL Builder. 
  When a lead clicks on your Campaign link, the parameters will transmit the data to your Google Analytics Dashboard. Google Analytics will then show the platform that generates the most revenue for your Campaign in its reports. With this data, you will know which platform has been effective for your Ad Campaigns, and you can decide where to concentrate the majority of your Marketing efforts and budget.
• Campaign Medium: The Campaign Medium refers to the kind of Advertising Medium through which you are running your Campaigns. A Medium could be Cost Per Click (for Google Ads), Email (for Newsletters), or Social (for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram).
• Campaign Name: This is the title of your Campaign. It is the unique identifier for a particular Campaign. An example is ‘Christmas Shoes Sale’.
• Campaign Term: This is the paid keyword for your Ad. This will mostly be used to track your keywords during a Paid AdWords Campaign. You may also use it to identify aspects of your Audience in display Ad Campaigns.
• Campaign Content: This feature covers specific Ad details like your Ad size or type. When you create different variations of the same Ad, you can use the ‘Content’ tag to distinguish them from one another.

A typical Google Campaign URL looks like this:

www.typical.com/store?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=christmas_shoe_sale&utm_term=christmas_sale&utm_content=sale%30

Benefits of the Google URL Builder

The Google Analytics URL Builder is a fantastic free Google tool for tracking and measuring what happens on a website; in essence, it comes with a lot of User-offered benefits, like:

• Effectively Drive Campaigns: It helps you determine the efficiency of your Campaigns, and it lets you discover areas that need improvement. From your Google Analytics Report, you can tell which platforms bring the highest revenue and then you can concentrate your Marketing efforts on those platforms.
• Saves Time and Money: It helps you save time and money. If the Text Ad you are running generates a lot of Sales, your Google Analytics Dashboard reports the information so that you don’t have to make a Graphic Ad for your Campaign.
• Proving your Value: The Google URL Builder aids you in proving your value as a Reliable Marketer. If you are a new hire, chances are your employer still has a few doubts about employing you. Daily analysis of your first Ad Campaign will quickly remove those doubts in your employer’s mind. 
• Gaining Marketing Experience: It improves your Marketing experience. Without a tool like the Google URL Builder to analyze Campaign Performance, Marketers may be unable to determine why an Ad Campaign failed. 
• Acquiring Knowledge: Using the Google URL Builder for numerous Campaigns will teach you what methods work for each type of campaign, grooming you into a Marketing expert.

What is Campaign Tracking in Google Analytics?

Campaign Tracking or “utm tracking codes” let you add a special tracking code to your URL. It also helps identify how users are coming in to your site. So instead of using this link in your email marketing campaigns:
https://hevodata.com/

You can use this tracking link:

https://hevodata.com/

All the extra bits in that link make up the campaign tracking code.

How do I use the Google URL Builder?

Here are the steps involved in using Google URL Builder for your campaigns:

• Step 1: Supply the link you want to use to take visitors to your website. For instance,

https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/how-to-setup-google-analytics/

• Step 2: Next, you need to add the three main parameters that you wish to track.
  • Campaign Medium: This parameter lets Google know what kind of source it’s coming from. For instance, email.
  • Campaign Source: This parameter lets Google know where is the traffic coming from. For instance, december6-newsletter.
  • Campaign Name: This parameter is used to describe your campaign. For this case, it would be how-to-set-up-google-analytics.

• Step 3: Click on the “Copy URL” button and paste it into your email newsletter (social, ad, etc..) as opposed to your regular untagged link. You can repeat these steps for all of the links that you want to track in marketing.

Where do I find my campaigns in Google Analytics?

If you want to take a look at clicks, email deliverability, and open rates, all you need to do is log into your email service provider and look at the reports. If you wish to see who actually converted, you can log into your Google Analytics account.

Here are a couple of conversions you should be tracking for your campaigns:

• Newsletter Subscribers
• Contact Form Submissions
• Product Purchases

After logging into Google Analytics, browse to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns. Here, you can take a peek at how long have your visitors stayed on your website, how many visits you’ve received from your campaign, the conversions, and bounce rate among other metrics.

Where can I see if my campaigns are converting?

To look at the actual conversions, look towards the top right of the table, just below the line graph. You’ll find a column for conversions over there. From the dropdown, you can choose which goal conversion you’d like to see. In this example, you’ll be looking at newsletter subscribers.

This will allow you to see the goal conversions and visits for each campaign. If you go back and peek at the trends over time, you can see the type of articles people spend more time on and which ones are a hit with your target crowd. On top of this, you can use Google Analytics and Google Sheets in tandem to take a look at all of your top converting pages in a single report.

Steps to use the Google URL Builder

This section focuses on how to set up the Google URL Builder to make your Ad Campaigns more efficient and organized. 

• Step 1: Access the Google URL Builder
• Step 2: Insert your Campaign Parameters
• Step 3: Generate your Tracking URL
• Step 4: Insert the Tracking Address within the Campaigns
• Step 5: Analyze Daily Results in Google Analytics

Step 1: Access the Google URL Builder

Go to your browser and visit the following link, https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/. The website will present you with the required Campaign Parameters form fields to fill in your details.

Step 2: Insert your Campaign Parameters

In the space for ‘Website URL‘, insert the website address of the Campaign Page that you want to track. Similarly, fill the other form fields of ‘Content Source‘, ‘Content Medium‘, ‘Content Name‘ by putting the relevant data in the rest of the parameter boxes. 

Step 3: Generate your Tracking URL

After entering all the relevant details in the field boxes, the Google URL Builder will generate a Campaign URL at the bottom, which can be copied or shortened. For shortening the link you would require a Bitly account.

Step 4: Insert the Tracking Address within the Campaigns

Copy the tracking address and paste it in the area assigned to codes within your Email Newsletter, Blog Posts, or Social Media Campaigns.

Step 5: Analyse Daily Results in Google Analytics

After you get a few conversions, Google Analytics will start reporting your Campaign data. Take the following steps to check your Campaign results:

• Log in to your Google Analytics account and click on ‘Acquisition‘. 
• Then, select ‘Campaigns‘ in the dropdown menu. 
• You will see a list of all your Campaign names in a table.
• Remember that the Campaigns are on the table. The other columns in the table contain the rest of the parameters like ‘Source, Medium, and Term‘. 
• Select ‘Source‘ to see which campaign platform has the highest referrals.

When to use the Google URL Campaign Builder?

The only situation where you don’t need to use Google URL Campaign Builder is if you had a couple of natural inbound links to your website. Apart from this, any traffic that comes from Google like Google Adwords or Google Display Ads traffic will be taken correctly without the use of Google URL Campaign Builder.

Google URL Campaign Builder needs to be leveraged to track any type of outside marketing such as display ads that aren’t Google. For instance:

• Social posts that you place organically.
• Social Ads.
• Anything where you own the property and you’re bringing in traffic by means of any other source.
• PDFs you create where you send traffic from that PDF to your website.

Limitations of Google URL Builder

Although the Google Analytics URL Builder provides numerous benefits, there are a few drawbacks you should be aware of before utilising it:

• Manual Data Entry: Marketers must manually fill up the URL of the website (landing page) and the UTM Parameter fields. In addition, you must manually copy-paste each tracking link you create and then click (and copy-paste again) to shorten links.
  A large organisation, on the other hand, may conduct hundreds of Campaigns across various Channels or geographies. In situations like these, where teams must produce hundreds of connections, this tool will be time-consuming.
• Limited to Standard Parameters: Business organisations frequently require more detailed data in Google Analytics to compare Campaigns or experiences that aren’t currently covered by Campaign Source, Medium, Name, Term, or Content. In the Google URL Builder, however, there is no possibility to add Custom Dimensions to your Campaign URLs.
• No Bulk Processing: When you enter the data into the tool, it produces them one at a time before resetting the URL and Parameter fields. So you can’t check what codes you’ve previously generated or establish templates for repeated Campaign codes.
• Formatting Constraints: The Google URL Builder is case-sensitive, and there are constraints on using character types, like ‘?’ should only be used as a query between the URL body and the query string. Plus you can’t use spaces in the Campaign tracking URL.

Conclusion

The Google Analytics URL Builder 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 allows you to segment your data and better understand how your advertising is working.

The Google URL Builder is a great tool that helps you save money and achieve accelerated success in your Campaigns, especially if you work with a small business. For large businesses, the absence of safeguards for this decentralised and manual instrument leads to missing, segregated, and inconsistent data. It may be time to investigate other solutions if inconsistencies in data are causing problems for Marketers and Analysts.

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