Before the Facebook Marketing Campaign

I wrote yesterday that today was the day for my very first Facebook marketing campaign, and that was the plan until I couldn't find the time to actually do it. Now, I am telling you that tomorrow will be the day.

I did something else today, something related to the marketing campaign and something very important.

In fact it's so important that I need to tell you to start with this before you start with any Internet marketing campaign, this is not only related to Facebook.

Do you have any idea what I am talking about?

I am talking about statistics and spending time to set up tracking for your marketing campaign. I am all set for tomorrow, and I am using Google Analytics and their campaign tracking. They use something called link tagging which is a way to identify your marketing campaigns.

I am not going to use a lot of words explaining how to install Google Analytics, I am not going to write about how to use Google Analytics in general or how to integrate Google Analytics with WordPress, but I am going to tell you a few things regarding the most important things to remember when you are tracking a marketing campaign.

First, you need to know the basics. There are five elements that you need to understand in a Google Analytics link, you don't need to use all the five elements, but I think that you need to know about them.

The link you are going to use will be very long, but that's because all the elements are included in the link. This is an example of a link that I could be using (but I am not using it, it's only an example):

http: // www. slymarketing.com/?utm_source=facebook& utm_medium=banner&utm_term=church&utm_content=christmas& utm_campaign=white-christmas

Yes, it's long and you might get a little confused when you see it for the first time. But take a deep breath and now let's continue to look at the elements.

• Your destination url is everything before the ?
• utm_source=is where my campaign is at (Facebook)
• utm_medium=is my marketing material (banner)
• utm_term=is the keyword that you have paid for (church)
• utm_content=this is to differentiate the various ads (christmas)
• utm_campaign=my slogan for the campaign (white christmas)

And you can see that you have to start with the ? and use the & between all the elements, but don't think that you would have to remember all this, because you don't.

Google have something they call the URL Builder, and it helps you build this long url, and they will explain it all to you.

But why is using link tagging so important for your marketing campaigns?

I have two answers for you:

• To do split testing and differentiate ads
• To easier see the big picture and all the stats you need

Let's say that I want to use two different ads on Facebook and both the ads will have the same destination URL. If I don't use the Google Analytics link tagging, I can see that Facebook is the referring URL, but I can't see which ad they clicked on. So, if I want to test which one of the ads performs best for me, I have to use link tagging and use different words at utm_content=.

If you want to see a detailed report regarding your campaign and the referral url, you should use link tagging. Now, the only thing you need to do is to click on campaign in the left menu and then click on your campaign, and you will get all the information you need. It's very easy to do once you set up the campaign, and that's really not hard either, at least not if you use the URL Builder.