Using Google’s URL Builder to Track Data from Multiple Advertising Platforms

Tracking the success of PPC campaigns is a critical step in evaluating a company’s ROI for its advertising spend. Those in the marketing world know that Google Analytics is usually the “go-to” site for tracking where visitors come from and whether they are quality visitors. But, every so often you encounter analytics from a different source that need to be taken in to account. If you are lucky, the analytics in your new source will jive with match the data in Google Analytics, but more often than not it won’t.

Let’s say you have PPC campaigns running on AdWords, Facebook and LinkedIn, how can you gather data to compare these multiple advertising platforms? The best way to do this is by getting data from all three sources to appear in Google Analytics.

Doing this for AdWords happens automatically since it’s a Google advertising platform which is synced with Analytics. For the rest of your advertising platforms (Facebook and LinkedIn, in our example) you should use Google’s URL builder for your destination URL.

Go to the URL Builder and enter your URL and campaign information.

This screenshot provides an example:

Google URL Builder

After you hit submit, you will be provided with a URL which includes that data you filled out.

Here is the URL for the example we just saw:

www.example.com/test?tm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=blog%20example

Simply copy and paste this URL as the destination URL for your campaign, and you will then be able to track the new campaign in Google Analytics.