Campaign Tagging

The source field is intended to indicate the source of the content in which the link was found.

The source parameter should indicate the specific location in which the link was provided. The specifics depend on the medium. For example, for social media posts (medium=”social”), the source should specify the particular social media service (e.g. “meta”, “instagram”, etc.). For links provided in emails (medium=”email”), the source parameter should generally be the unit (and department, if applicable) which sent the email.

Include the Responsible Unit/Department

We don’t just have one Facebook page, we have hundreds.
We don’t just have one department sending email messages, we have many.

That means that putting “meta”, or “instagram” in the source field is not enough to determine the actual source. We also need to know what department at Mason was behind this content. Therefore the source field should also indicate the unit and department.

To this end, the Mason campaign URL builder has dedicated fields to indicate the unit and department, in addition to a more-specific source field. The URL builder combines these three separate fields into a single, combined source parameter in the final campaign-tagged link.

Social media example: for links posted on Facebook by the Mason Community Arts Academy, the final source would be: “cvpa-mcaa-facebook”.

Email example: for links included in the monthly email newsletter sent by the Mason Community Arts Academy, the final source would be: “cvpa-mcaa-newsletter”.

It is critical to include both your unit and department in the source field, in addition to the specific source, so that we can:

• aggregate all of your unit/department’s campaign traffic together in reports
• segment web analytics data by any combination of unit/department, and more specific source

The medium parameter should indicate the type of media in which the link is provided (e.g. “email”, “social”, etc.).

Specifically, the medium parameter should use one of the following values:

The campaign field should indicate the overall marketing effort or initiative that the communication is intended to advance: what purpose does this communication serve? This is very much is up to your unit/department, but take the time up-front to plan a strategy. Remember to use something unambiguous, and to check the campaign reports on the websites to which you are planning on directing campaign links to make sure that you are not using a campaign parameter that is already in use. The campaign “mason202025” may already be taken.

You should think in general terms as you want to use the same campaigns across all different media. If you use a separate campaign for each-and-every message, you won’t be able to easily track different communications in a unified campaign.

How you organize your campaigns depends a great deal on how you organize your business, and how you want to measure your ROI.

For example, you might organize many of your communications around specific time periods (for example, 2025 spring enrollment).
However you might also undertake specific marketing efforts for certain programs (like a specific 2025 theater initiative).

But what if you want to be able to measure the effectiveness of individual communications separately?
That’s where the two additional optional fields come into play.

The content field is intended to store information about the content of the message or advertisement. For example you may want to:

• use two versions of an ad (perhaps a banner ad vs. a sidebar ad), or
• two ads with identical wording but different images (cat vs. person), or
• provide content about a particular topic in a social media post or newsletter…

…and you be able to track their effectiveness independently.

For example, let’s say that you send newsletters with content related to art, music, theater, etc.
In that case you could use the content field to specify what the communication’s focus was.

Using this schema, you would be able to slice-and-dice your reports by any combination of: medium (how are your emails doing vs.vs your social media posts), source (how is Facebook performing vs. Instagram), campaign (how is the 2018 spring campaign doing vs. the previous term’s campaign), or even content (how our our music-related communications doing across all media vs. arts-related communications).

Term

The term field is intended to store the search term for links from online search ads. However, since ads purchased through Google AdWords are automatically tagged in Google Analytics (as both products are owned by Google), in practice the term field is only necessary for search ads on non-Google networks.

You absolutely should use campaign tagging in your marketing emails. Vendor-provided metrics like open rate (not reliable) and click-through rate (reliable, but incomplete) are not enough.

Medium Parameter

For links provided in emails, the medium parameter should always be “email”.

Source Parameter

The source parameter should indicate what unit/department is sending the email.

You should indicate your unit (and department, if applicable) in the source parameter, in order to disambiguate the analytics data of sessions resulting from campaign link clicks from your emails other departments on campus. The recommended method is to use the abbreviation for your unit, delimited by a hyphen, followed by the department or group withing that unit (if applicable), delimited by a hyphen. For example: “chss”, “chss-psychology”, “admissions”, etc.

This enables you to easily filter the data in a few different ways:

• If you filter for just the unit and department (i.e. “chss-psychology”), you would see all of the aggregated data for all the Psychology Department’s email links.
• If you filter just the unit (i.e. “chss”), you would see the aggregated data for all of CHSS’s email links.

Campaign Parameter

The campaign parameter is up to the department, but remember to use something relatively unambiguous, and to check the campaign reports on the websites to which you are planning on directing campaign links, to ensure that you are not using the same campaign parameter as another unit/department. Alternately, when viewing your campaign reports in Google Analytics, be sure to filter first for your desired source parameter to ensure that you are seeing just your data.

Content Parameter (optional)

The content parameter can be used to specify either the individual email or the group of related emails containing the link.

Specifying different links for each individual email is time-consuming to set-up, and does not necessarily provide a good ROI. But it does give you very granular information about which specific emails are generating clicks.

On the other hand, you may find that you only need to include basic information about the general type of email in the content parameter. For example: if your department sends out emails for inquiries, applications, etc. for each of your programs with links to the program page in question, it may be enough to set the content parameter to “inquiry”, “apply”, etc. You can then use the “Landing Page” field in Google Analytics to disambiguate the specific email in your campaign reports.

For example:

• if you want to label our analytics data distinctly for each individual email you send the content parameter could be something like “anthropology-inquiry-20170425”.
• if you don’t need to label links for each individual email, you could use something like “inquiry”.

Please note: if you use dates in your content parameter, it is recommended that you format the dates in the order shown (YYYYMMDD). In this way the dates are indicated from the largest division (year) to the smallest (day) so that you can easily search for emails sent within a specific year, a specific month, or on a specific date.

Please use campaign-tagging in your social media posts. In some situations social media is indispensable; in others it doesn’t effectively drive traffic. You need to be able to measure the effect of your social media marketing to see which is which.

Medium Parameter

For posts on social media, the medium parameter should always be “social”.

Source Parameter

The source parameter should indicate the social media service to which the link is posted.
For example: “facebook”, “instagram”, “twitter”, etc.

The source parameter should also indicate your unit/department.
You should also indicate your unit (and department, if applicable) in the source parameter, in order to disambiguate the analytics data of your specific social media presence from others on campus. The recommended method is to prefix the name of the social media service with an abbreviation for your unit, delimited by a hyphen, followed by the department or group withing that unit (if applicable), delimited by a hyphen.

For example, if the Psychology Department (which is a Department within CHSS) wanted to share a link on their Facebook page, the recommended source parameter would be “chss-psychology-facebook”.
In this way, the source parameter “narrows-down” from largest organizational unit to the smallest.

This enables you to easily filter the data in a few different ways:

• If you filter for the full source parameter (i.e. “chss-psychology-facebook”), you would see only the data for the the Psychology department’s Facebook page.
• If you filter for just the unit and department (i.e. “chss-psychology”), you would see all of the aggregated data for all the Psychology Department’s social media accounts.
• If you filter just the unit (i.e. “chss”), you would see the aggregated data for all of CHSS’s social media presences.

Note that if you don’t include your unit/department, but instead use a source parameter that only indicates the social media service (e.g. “facebook”), your analytics data would be aggregated with that of any other department that used the same source parameter.

Note for Google+: don’t use the plus (+) character in the source parameter (i.e. “google+”). Instead. just use “google”. The combination of medium=”social” and source=”google” will tell us that it’s Google+. The plus character will be interpreted as a space in the GA reports, so “google+” will turn into “google “ (“google” followed by a space), which will make it more tricky to work with in Google Analytics (filter, export, etc).

Campaign Parameter

The campaign parameter is up to the department, but remember to use something relatively unambiguous, and to check the campaign reports on the websites to which you are planning on directing campaign links, to ensure that you are not using the same campaign parameter as another unit/department. Alternately, when viewing your campaign reports in Google Analytics, be sure to filter first for your desired source parameter to ensure that you are seeing just your data.

Content Parameter (optional)

The content parameter may be used to provide additional data about the content of the social media post. For example, this parameter may be used to further narrow-down the topic listed in your campaign.

Yes, you can use campaign tagging for links you share in printed materials! By combining print-specific links with redirects, you can get the benefits of campaign tagging with vanity URLs. How many visits did that marketing postcard generate. Find out by implementing more specific recommendations on campaign-tagging for print communications.

How To Use Campaign Tagging in Printed Materials

Yes, you can use campaign tagging on links used in printed materials. Since links found in printed materials have to be typed in manually by a user, you should try to provide as short and concise a URL as possible. Often this will mean that using a URL redirect. You provide your user with a short, easy-to-type link that redirects to the full URL with campaign parameters included. These can be called short links, redirect links, vanity URLs, etc.

For example, let’s say that you have a link that you want to share on a printed postcard: https://www2.gmu.edu/admissions-aid/how-apply/accelerated-masters. This link is somewhat long and unwieldy, and users may be dissuaded from typing in the full link. Instead of using this long URL, you could set-up a short redirect link like gmu.edu/accelerated-masters-2018, which is much easier for the user to remember and type-in, and which redirects to the full longer URL.

Simple Redirect: gmu.edu/accelerated-masters-2018 (nice URL) -> https://www2.gmu.edu/admissions-aid/how-apply/accelerated-masters (real URL)

Implementing campaign tagging just takes this concept one step further by adding your campaign tagging parameters to the redirect URL.

Redirect with Campaign Tagging: gmu.edu/accelerated-masters-2018 (nice URL) -> https://www2.gmu.edu/admissions-aid/how-apply/accelerated-masters?utm_medium=print&utm_source=vse-ait&utm_campaign=apply2018 (real URL with campaign tags added)

If you designate a redirect URL for use in printed materials, make sure it is only used for that purpose. If you have a redirect set-up as described above, and you use the same short link in an email, social media post, or elsewhere, the campaign tagging parameters added by the redirect will overwrite the real source/medium information.

Medium Parameter

For links used in printed materials, the medium parameter should always be “print”.

Source Parameter

The source parameter should indicate what unit/department is sending the email.

You should indicate your unit (and department, if applicable) in the source parameter, in order to disambiguate the analytics data of sessions resulting from campaign link clicks from your emails other departments on campus. The recommended method is to use the abbreviation for your unit, delimited by a hyphen, followed by the department or group withing that unit (if applicable), delimited by a hyphen. For example: “chss”, “chss-psychology”, “admissions”, etc.

This enables you to easily filter the data in a few different ways:

• If you filter for just the unit and department (i.e. “chss-psychology”), you would see all of the aggregated data for all the Psychology Department’s email links.
• If you filter just the unit (i.e. “chss”), you would see the aggregated data for all of CHSS’s email links.

Campaign Parameter

The campaign parameter is up to the you, but remember to use something unambiguous, and to check the existing campaign reports to ensure that you are not using a campaign parameter that is already in-use.

Content Parameter (optional)

The content parameter may be used to provide additional data about the context of the printed link.

TV advertising should use vanity/redirect URLs in order to provide the viewer with a short, easy-to-type, easy-to-remember URL, which redirects to the ‘real’ page you want the user to land on. The redirect should include the campaign parameters so that we can track the traffic from this ad.

How To Use Campaign Tagging in Television Advertising

Yes, you can use campaign tagging on links used in TV ads. Since links seen on TV ads have to be typed in manually by a user, and since we want to be able to track traffic from these ads specifically, you should try to provide as short and concise a URL as possible in the form of a URL redirect. You provide your user with a short, easy-to-type link that redirects to the full URL with campaign parameters included. These can be called short links, redirect links, vanity URLs, etc.

In addition to simply transferring users from the vanity URL to our website, the redirect will also add identifying campaign-tagging parameters to the redirect URL. This will enable Google Analytics to identify which incoming traffic was specifically a result of the redirect from the vanity URL on this television ad. This will will enable us to measure how many visits to our website were a result of people seeing this ad.

Note: because the URL redirection will automatically add the specified campaign-tagging parameters every time the vanity URL is used, whatever URL we use on the end of the ad can ONLY be used on the video. If we were to use the same URL anywhere else, any visits resulting from these other sources would be incorrectly attributed to the video.

Interested in a more-specific case-study? Please see the post: Tracking of A-10 Video Spot on NBC Sports Networks

Medium Parameter

For links used in printed materials, the medium parameter should always be “tv”.

Source Parameter

The source parameter should indicate both what unit/department is placing the ad, as well as what TV network is it running on.

You should indicate your unit (and department, if applicable) in the source parameter, in order to disambiguate the analytics data of sessions resulting from campaign link clicks from your emails other departments on campus. The recommended method is to use the abbreviation for your unit, delimited by a hyphen, followed by the department or group withing that unit (if applicable), delimited by a hyphen, followed by the name of the TV network running the ad. For example: “chss-nbc”. If the ad is being placed by the university as a whole (not a particular unit or department) you need only include the TV network info.

Campaign Parameter

The campaign parameter is up to the you, but remember to use something unambiguous, and to check the existing campaign reports to ensure that you are not using a campaign parameter that is already in-use.

Content Parameter (optional)

The content parameter may be used to provide additional data about the context of the TV ad, if needed.

Radio advertising should also use vanity/redirect URLs in order to provide the listener with a short, easy-to-type, easy-to-remember URL. This vanity URL should automatically redirect to the ‘real’ page you want the user to land on. As with TV advertising, the redirect should include the campaign parameters so that we can track the traffic from the ad.

How To Use Campaign Tagging in Radio Advertising

Yes, you can use campaign tagging on links used in radio ads. Since links heard on radio ads have to be remembered and later typed in manually by a user, and since we want to be able to track traffic from these ads specifically, you should try to provide as short and concise a URL as possible in the form of a URL redirect. You provide your user with a short, easy-to-remember and easy-to-type link that redirects to the full URL with campaign parameters included. These can be called short links, redirect links, vanity URLs, etc.

In addition to simply transferring users from the vanity URL to our website, the redirect will also add identifying campaign-tagging parameters to the redirect URL. This will enable Google Analytics to identify which incoming traffic was specifically a result of the redirect from the vanity URL in the radio ad. This will will enable us to measure how many visits to our website were a result of people seeing this ad.

Note: because the URL redirection will automatically add the specified campaign-tagging parameters every time the vanity URL is used, whatever URL we use on the end of the ad can ONLY be used on the video. If we were to use the same URL anywhere else, any visits resulting from these other sources would be incorrectly attributed to the video.

Medium Parameter

For links used in printed materials, the medium parameter should always be “radio”.

Source Parameter

The source parameter should indicate both what unit/department is placing the ad, as well as what radio station is it running on.

You should indicate your unit (and department, if applicable) in the source parameter, in order to disambiguate the analytics data of sessions resulting from campaign link clicks from your emails other departments on campus. The recommended method is to use the abbreviation for your unit, delimited by a hyphen, followed by the department or group withing that unit (if applicable), delimited by a hyphen, followed by the name of the radio station running the ad. For example: “chss-wamu”. If the ad is being placed by the university as a whole (not a particular unit or department) you need only include the radio station info.

Campaign Parameter

The campaign parameter is up to the you, but remember to use something unambiguous, and to check the existing campaign reports to ensure that you are not using a campaign parameter that is already in-use.

Content Parameter (optional)

The content parameter may be used to provide additional data about the context of the radio ad, if needed.