4 Tips & Tricks for Using the Google URL Builder

4 Tips & Tricks for Using the Google URL Builder

Marketing campaigns – whether they be through social media, website advertisements, or emails – are a critical tool in your business’s marketing tool belt. However, it would almost be a waste of resources to set up a campaign without good tracking analytics. This is where UTM codes come into play; these are tiny snippets of code that send the requested information off to your analytics tool every time a link is clicked. This can be extremely helpful in determining the success of your different marketing efforts.

Let’s take a look at one useful tool that will help you build these snippets – all without learning any code!

What Is the Google URL Builder?

The Google URL builder (officially Google Campaign Builder) is a free to use tool that Google provides to customize a URL. It can be used as a component of Google Analytics that will help you build snippets of UTM code (Universal Tracking Method) that gets attached to your destination link. Essentially, the Google URL builder makes it easier to build the links that you will need for your campaigns and far easier to track them. All you have to do is input the different metrics that the tool asks for, and it will output exactly what you need to copy/paste into your email or social media post.

What Is It Used for?

As mentioned above, the Google URL builder is used to quickly build URLs that can be copied and pasted directly into your content – emails, social media posts, app advertisements, and webpages. This tool was developed to save time while generating many links at once.

Tips and Tricks for Using the Google URL Builder

#1: Stay Consistent With Your Tags

For each link, you will need to input the following. Try to stay consistent with your campaign names and other tags so that multiple instances don’t get created to log the same campaign. This can throw off your metrics and provide inaccurate results for your analytics.

  • Campaign Source – e.g. newsletter
  • Campaign Medium – e.g. email, digital ad banner
  • Campaign Name – e.g. spring_sale
  • Campaign Term – can be used for specific keywords
  • Campaign Content – perhaps you’re using different ads

This will build a link, to something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ+&utm_source=online&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=promo_SPRING&utm_term=widget&utm_content=spring_b

Don’t worry, you can use a URL shortener which we talk about here.

You can hopefully see that if mapped out correctly beforehand, how easy it would be to track where your clicks are coming from, and how easily confusing it could be if not planned out.

#2: Use Your UTM URLs Wherever Possible

There are website tools out there that will track your views and their originating source; however, some of these tools can be unreliable. UTM links, on the other hand, will consistently output data about the source of views, as long as you have set them up properly.

NOTE: Do not use UTM link when internal linking, or linking one page of your website to another. This can confuse Google Analytics.

#3: Use the Right URL Builder

There are three different types of Google URL builders within Campaign Builder: the Google Analytics Campaign Builder, the Google Play URL Builder, and the iOS Campaign Tracking URL Builder. If you’re creating marketing campaigns that don’t lead to an app download, you won’t need the second two URL builders.

AND, ensure you click on the GA4 as well as UA in the upper left, read about that here.

#4: Google URL Builder Works Best with Google Analytics

Since UTM codes were designed to be used in analytics tools, it makes sense to use the king of analytics: Google Analytics. Google Analytics will display your campaigns under the Acquisition → Campaigns → All Campaigns screen. This menu will display the outputs for all UTM link clicks on things like contact form submission emails, newsletter emails, social media clicks, website advertisements, and more.

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