As publishers, you’ve seen your local and regional businesses struggle with the shift they’ve had to make to stay afloat in 2020.

From eat-in to take-out.

Browsing a boutique to curb-side pick-up.

We’ve seen the same from our vantage point here at January Spring.  We’ve also watched local businesses figure out that they have to provide an e-commerce option for their customers.  This means, that we as marketing professionals have had to help our advertising clients adapt and learn e-commerce right along with them.

Here’s our primer on what you need to know about Google Analytics to support your clients.

Google Analytics picks up where January Spring completes it’s tracking. Once a potential customer clicks through to a website, we “hand-off” that user to the business website.  Google Analytics starts tracking from there.

What can Google Analytics Track?

A simple set up with Google Analytics provides a mountain of data. Data that can help you and your advertising client answer these questions about their marketing investments:

How much traffic is driven to your site by different marketing channels?
Which marketing channels are delivering traffic?
Which websites refer the most visitors?
Where do your site visitors live?
What is the conversion rate of visitors from different channels?

Google Analytics can gather a broad range of data about a site and how visitors use it, including:

How many visitors your pages get.
Where visitors come to your pages from.
How those visitors progress through your site.
What visitors do on your pages.
How visitors interact with elements on your pages.
How long visitors spend on your pages.
At what stage of a visit users leave your site.

Our best practice to make sure that every click is tracked and recorded in a way that is meaningful to an advertiser is to use a tracking URL.  This is the best way to see what happens after the click, within a client’s Google Analytics.  This is most commonly done with what’s called a UTM code — a snippet of code that’s added to the end of the URL to further track the campaign.

Google’s built an easy tool to make this post-click tracking a breeze:

Campaign Source – The platform (or vendor) where the traffic originates, like Facebook or your email newsletter.
Campaign Medium – You can use this to identify the medium like Cost Per Click (CPC), social media, geo-fence, or QR code.
Campaign Name – This is just to identify your campaign. Like your website or specific product promotion.

From these inputs, the Google Campaign URL Builder will generate a unique URL that is sent to January Spring as the click-through URL for your campaign.  It’s that easy to get the credit you deserve for a well-managed ad campaign.

All this data feeds right into Google Analytics.  Here’s how it looks for one of our active partners.  Note that they named each source and medium so they could track each programmatic tactic as well as each social tactic: Geo=Geo-fence, Key=Keyword retargeting, SITE=Site retargeting, FB/Boost=Boosted Facebook posts.

Wanna geek out a bit more on Google Analytics?  Check out this additional article for more in-depth details.  Or, as always, reach out to your January Spring Sales Director.  We are always here to help.