Intro
We built a webpage tool to replace this one by Google. It’s so users can paste in a link and get the url parameters they need to track their campaign in Google Analytics. It’s been designed to let multiple users across an organisation add tracking in a consistent way that doesn’t require them to have any knowledge of Google Analytics. Resulting in clean crisp campaign data having to worry about email being both utm_medium and utm_source or worse still no tracking added at all.
- Demo
- Download it as a zip (with setup instructions).
- Fork it on GitHub.
Background
Previous to moving to the charity sector I did digital marketing at a mature ecommerce startup. Practically all marketing was via digital channels and anyone posting links on social media or in emails was au fait with Google Analytics as they were in the digital marketing team. So all links went out with nice campaign url parameters added like this:
http://www.example.com?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=topbanner
However moving to the charity sector (or perhaps just a bigger organisation) I found it difficult to get everyone tracking links in a consistant way. The press team and sports fundraising team don’t use Google Analytics, however both could well be tweeting links or writing external web content. Training teams that have a staff turnover on camapaign parameters was difficult and even if training sticks with a settled team you might end up with lots of different ways of spelling a campaign. E.G.
- LondonMarathon
- Thelondonmarathon
- Marathon2015
To solve some of these issues we built a tool so that users select from dropdowns rather than freetext fields, removing the elements of choice that led to bad data. Source and medium get set as one selection and campaigns are limited to defined campaigns, have a look at the demo, it’ll explain it better. You’ll need to tweak the HTML to set it up for the sources/mediums/campaigns which you use. Since we went live almost every link that goes out is tracked, up from less than half.
Credits
Built by Owen & Jim @ Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research and Tom @ The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity. Using code examples from Google & 9 lessons nifty Bootstrap courtesy of Layoutit & Minikomi