This report is meant to help you see all of your ad campaigns and will likely be used hand-in-hand with the Ad Versions report to help you get a glimpse of your entire advertising and marketing focus. In order to be able to track your campaigns, you must first assign each campaign an ID so Google Analytics knows what it is tracking. To do this, you must assign tracking IDs to each campaign. This is done by attaching variables to your destination links in your ads. Let's take a look at each of these variables and what they mean so you will be able to label your links and track your campaigns with this report.
utm_campaign This is the name of the overall campaign. Yes, you may be doing an email ad, some paid links and some banner ads, but, if they are all for the same thing, this is what needs to be your campaign name. For example, "Semi_Annual_Sale" is your campaign name, which becomes the value for the utm_campaign variable.
utm_medium This is how you're going to be getting the marketing messages to potential customers. This is where you indicate Pay-Per-Click, email or banner ads. Whatever you indicate here is the value for this variable.
utm_source This is the who. Who are you working with in order to create the medium for the campaign? Are your ads coming from Google, from Yahoo or from another service? Whatever you indicate here is the value for this variable.
utm_content This is where you can indicate the multiple versions of the same ad so you can see which version the ad responds best to. This is the primary way the Ad Versions report discussed in a previous article becomes useful to you.
utm_term This is not always used, but is where you should indicate any keyword phrases you are purchasing.
Not all variables should be used all the time, but the ones that you must always use are: utm_campaign, utm_source and utm_medium. These will help you make sure that you are making the most of Google Analytics. When naming the values, remember these things will be what shows up in Google Analytics. If you need help with these, you can use the Google Analytics URL Tools.
By attaching these to the ends of your links whenever you start a new campaign, you will be able to tell which link brought the user to your site. When you see a site bringing more traffic than others, you can then decide to vest more time in that particular portion of your campaign, and when you see one not doing well, you should adjust time and money spent there.
