Learn How to Use Google Analytics Campaigns Reports to Track Traffic to Your Web site,

2008-10-23

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Report Overview

To get to the Campaigns Report, click Traffic, and then click Campaigns. This report will show you the same data as all the other reports do. The screen shot is below.

Visits: The total number of visits to your site (directly).
Pageviews: The total number of pageviews from these direct site visits.
Pageviews/visit: The average number of pages each visitor looked at while browsing your site directly.
Average Time on Site: The average amount of time the user spends on the direct visit to your site.
% New Visits: The total number of new direct visits.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of time the user comes to your site and then leaves because he or she cannot find what she was looking for or came to the wrong site.

How to Use this Report

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](/tools/utm_campaign, utm_source and utm_medium).

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.

This post is part of the series: Learn More About Your Website Traffic with Google Analytics

Learn all about the sources of your web traffic so you can find out what works and what doesn’t. This will help you decide what to do with your advertising budget.