Google Campaign Builder and You

At Cruxdata, we’re constantly receiving questions from our clients like; 

“which link in my Linktree generated the most visitors to my website?”
or  “how many visitors came from my Facebook Business Page versus my Facebook ad?” or “what percentage of visitors from Google was from search versus my Google My Business profile?”  

To answer these questions, a couple pieces must be in place - first and foremost, you must have Google Analytics configured on your site. Check out our 7 Step Guide To Setting Up Google Analytics (the steps are short, I swear). 

Now that you have Google Analytics installed, your website is able to start tracking website visitor data. This is a great start, but by using Google’s free Campaign URL Builder, you can distill your website visitor data all the way down to the exact location in which your website visitors came from. The tool is free, and available online here: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/


How does it work?

Google’s Campaign URL Builder allows you to take an existing URL, and add a specific code to it that will tell Google Analytics exactly where that URL exists.     

Let’s take a look at an example:   
Say you’re trying to run a Facebook advertisement for your company’s ugly sweater collection, and you want to send people to www.example.com/ugly-sweaters. Typically, you would put that  exact URL in the Facebook advertisement creator, so that when people click on that advertisement, that's where they land. The problem with creating ads with un-tracked URL’s is that you will not be unable to determine whether your traffic came from that specific ad, a separate Facebook ad, or your Facebook Business Page. Your Google Analytics will simply tell you that all of that traffic came from Facebook.

Let’s see it in action!

We’re going to create a Facebook ad for our ugly sweaters. Following our example, enter the URL www.example.com/ugly-sweaters in the first field “Website URL”. After entering your URL, enter the following values in the corresponding fields:

  • Campaign Source: Campaign Source is where a user will come from, where they will see this url.   For example: If you’re running a Facebook Advertisement, then your source would be “facebook_ad”.

  • Campaign Medium: Campaign Medium is the type of content that your URL will appear on. In this case, your campaign medium should be “DisplayAd”,

  • Campaign Name: Campaign Name is how you tell which campaign the link is for. Since you’re selling ugly sweaters,  type “uglysweatersFBAd_1” 

Note that the values you fill in the form of the tool are added to the URL address of your website in the bottom box. Simply select the “Copy URL” button and paste this URL where you normally would. 


Some things to remember: 

  • Be consistent with Campaign Medium types. For facebook or Google ads, use FacebookAd and GoogleAd as the value for “Campaign Medium” so that Crux Insights will track the ads more accurately

  • Use the Google Campaign URL Builder for each link that you put out. Every ad, every marketing email, every referral should have it’s own custom URL.

  • Each URL you create should be unique, so that you can see that link’s performance in your dashboard. You should create unique links for all of your social media profiles, linktrees, email campaigns and external referrals

  • All of the traffic generated from your different Google Campaign URLs are immediately visible in your Crux Insights, alongside all of your other website visitor data sources.