Track Twitter Campaigns with Google Analytics

It seems like just about every business is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. Whether this is right for your business or not; tracking the success of it is essential.

The majority of Tweets consist of a trimmed URL (link). This is how we could track these links from click to action on your website.

Ensure your site has Google Analytics installed to start with! If your site has a common goal such as a sale, newsletter sign-up, key page view etc it is recommended to set these up as goals within Analytics. These goals can then be recorded against traffic sources such as Twitter.
Gather the page on your site you want to link to for your tweet. For example – www.drpixel.be/latest-news.php
Now we get to the fun technical bit! We need to bolt on Google Analytics parameters to this link. This is what a full tagged link could look like:www.drpixel.be/latest-news.php?utm_campaign=First Twitter Campaign&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=260909The text in bold are the customisable parts of the tagging. I’ll break down the link further:
- utm_campaign – This is the overarching name of the campaign to be displayed within Analytics. I’ve given this a name of ‘First Twitter Campaign’ as an example
- utm_source – This is the main referrer. For any Twitter campaign should be simply ‘twitter’
- utm_medium – Medium could be cpc (cost per click), banner or email for example. In my example I’ve placed it under ‘social’ as it could be classed as a social media campaign
- utm_content – This is used to differentiate the individual tweets. This is important as it will record the success of each individual tweet in Google Analytics. In my example I have simply date stamped it. If posting multiple tweets in one day this could be more descriptive. It could even contain a tweet class or group; to judge the success of each tweet type (for example product push or news).
The finalised tagged URL now needs to be trimmed as it is way too long to fit into a tweet. I use http://bit.ly for this. Copy & paste your long link and click ‘shorten’. A much shorted, trimmed URL will be returned.
Use this trimmed URL in your tweet… and tweet away!

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