Tagging Links for Google Analytics

If you use Google Analytics to track the stats of your web site, you should know that there is an advanced feature called "tagging" that can help you track in-bound links to your site. These are tags you add to the end of your link that get passed on to the Google Analytics tracking code you place within your site’s HTML. These tags then provide that info to Google Analytics so that it shows up in your report. Google even has a handy URL builder to assist you in creating the tagged links.

Here’s a scenario where you might want to use this information:

Say you are a subscriber to USFreeAds, and place 3 classified ads there for a product you’re featuring on your web site. By default, Google Analytics will show you how many of your site visitors came from the USFreeAds.com domain, but how do you know which ad is performing the best?

Certainly the visit count on each ad at USFreeAds is helpful, but you want to know which ad actually generates the most click-through’s to your site.

So what you can do is use Google’s URL builder to tag three different URLs back to your site. You use the tags to identify and separate each of the three ads, and each USFreeAds classified will then have its own unique "tagged" link back to your site. Then inside of Google Analytics, you can view reports based on the results of clicked "tagged" links.

Where this really gets helpful is when you setup goals inside of Google Analytics to track click-through’s to the merchant site you’re promoting. You can follow not only which USFreeAd classified generates the most CTR to your site, but which classified generates the most CTR to the merchant site.

Obviously there are a thousand other ways a person could think of to utilize the reporting features you get from "tagging" the links, so I invite you to share the ways you use this great feature.

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