Common Campaign Tracking Use Cases and Examples
Below you will find a few examples of how you can use the campaign tracking features with various marketing campaigns. Each contains a short description of why you might use it, along with best practices and an example. You should only use as many campaign values as you need, so not every example below contains every parameter.
How to Track Email Marketing Campaigns
Clicks from emails are treated as direct visits by default, so campaign tracking links add useful context to clicks from this channel. The example below confirms the source of the traffic (newsletter), the medium (email) and reports on the specific email (2020_august_promo), and even tracks which single button was clicked within that campaign (primary-cta).
When the time comes to review the data, you could look at all of the campaigns from your newsletter source to compare their success. Or you could compare the content value to see which links within your emails were most successful.
Example Campaign Values
mtm_campaign: 2020_august_promomtm_source: newslettermtm_medium: emailmtm_content: primary-cta
Campaign URL Based on Above Example
https://example.com/?mtm_campaign=2020_august_promo&mtm_source=newsletter&mtm_medium=email&mtm_content=primary-cta
Tracking Campaigns on Third-Party Websites
Perhaps you are selling products on a third party auction website, or selling services through an online job board. In either case, you probably will not be able to add your own analytics code to the platform directly, but you can use tracked links to ensure that data is passed onto you when people click over to visit your website.
This use case is especially useful when you have to pay for placements on the third party websites. Gathering data on exactly which listings and elements people visit from, means you can focus your budget on the most effective placements.
Example Campaign Values
mtm_campaign: product_launchmtm_source: marketplacemtm_medium: displaymtm_content: banner
Campaign URL Based on Above Example
https://example.com/?mtm_campaign=product_launch&mtm_source=&mtm_medium=display&mtm_content=banner
Tracking Social Media Links
Not only are there many different social networks, but there are different types of content within these networks. When linking to your site from social networks, you can use campaign tracking URLs to analyse the performance of the individual networks and content types.
Using Twitter as an example, you could track the different types of link with the mtm_content parameter. For example, you could add mtm_content=profile for the link contained in your user bio, mtm_content=tweet for your regular status updates, and mtm_content=paid for any sponsored placements on the network.
Example Campaign Values
mtm_campaign: product-launchmtm_source: twittermtm_medium: socialmtm_content: tweet
Campaign URL Based on Above Example
https://example.com/?mtm_campaign=product_launch&mtm_source=twitter&mtm_medium=social&mtm_content=tweet
How to track Cost Per Click (CPC) Campaigns with Google Ads
Using campaign tracking links within Google Ads (and other ad networks) is an interesting use case because you can use dynamic values in place of your campaign values. This means you just have to put in one placeholder and the advertising network will automatically put in the relevant details for each ad that you run. You can view an example of this advanced configuration for Google Ads here.