Tagging Your PPC Campaigns for Success

You can’t measure success without tracking. 

When it comes to online marketing ‘tags’ are something we have all probably heard of before, but what are they exactly? In the online world tags can refer to any number of things, from pieces of code used to track certain events to parameters tracked on to the end of a URL to tell the destination page information about that visitor. We encounter them countless times when we go online, capturing information about how we got to our favourite e-merchant store to how long we spent completing our online banking. They peer into every facet of our online experience, reporting back to any number of tracking systems in order to determine whatever information someone gleans valuable or informative.

It should come as no surprise then understanding how people interact with your business or services online has a huge impact on your online marketing success. After all being able to quantify what led to someone buying, booking or bouncing off your site is key to encouraging or stopping it from happening again. Luckily there are a host of tools helping us to make this happen.

AdWord URL Tagging

Historically tagging a URL in Google AdWords involved changing the landing page URL, which any experienced Search Engine Marketer (SEM) will tell you wreaks havoc with an AdWords campaign, resetting ad ranks every time destination URL’s (or should I now say final URLs) are changed.  Fear not, as of July this year Google have released ValueTrack which is a set of URL tagging features allowing you to update tags on your URL’s without needing to change the URL’s themselves. This means you can now send a host of information about what was happening in that specific AdWords session through to your landing page. What’s more it now supports a host of parameters which are dynamically generated from the particular search that triggered your ads, not just static pre-set data.

Systems like Google Analytics will pick up these URL tags and make the data available for us to review. Beyond simply using URL tagging for tracking you can (with the help of a skilled web developer) have your website react to these URL tags and make changes accordingly. Imagine having your landing page dynamically react to the particular ad someone saw to display the promotion within the ad right on your landing page?!  I have already used these tools to have a mobile service page customise itself based on the location someone entered into Google – pretty cool huh?

Google Analytics & Other Tracking Platforms

Google has actually automatically been tagging your ad URLs for quite some time now. When you link your Analytics Tracking to your Google AdWords account, your destination URLs are automatically tagged.  This gives Analytics information about the Ad, Search Term, AdWords Campaign and more.

Website Tags

As I briefly touched on earlier tags don’t just refer to URLs or links. They can also be pieces of code or tracking installed into your website itself. They can add information to your site such as meta data, capture visitor information, generate an AdWords re-marketing audience or even report on sales you have had to some external reporting system. Website tags normally need to be installed by someone who knows what they’re doing or with the help of a web developer.

Social Media Tags

We are all aware of how tagging has affected the way we use social media. When you start using platforms like Facebook for your business there are a host of other things we can do using Pixels. Pixels are just a fancy name for website tags and allow you to do all sorts of exciting things to aid your Facebook marketing. Conversion pixels allow you to track leads or conversions and relate them back to users within your social media campaigns. Remarketing Pixels help you create custom audiences to really target the people you want to market to more specifically in order to get the most from your advertising spend.

So with all these different tags on your website how do we keep them all organised, up to date or make changes at scale?

Google Tag Manager

Once again the clever bunch at Google have found a solution to our modern day tagging nightmare by building a system which allows these tags to be added and removed at a moment’s notice.  Not only can tags be added and removed, Google Tag Manager allows us to apply logic to these tags in the same way a web developer could, to add tags to only fire when someone has actually completed a purchase or submitted an online enquiry. This makes it easier than ever to add conversion tags which only report when someone completes an online booking or finishes their sale.

I often get asked do I need to worry about using systems like Google Tag Manager. Absolutely! If you have a website and care about what happens on it then you need tracking. If you are going to go through the trouble of getting tracking tags installed, check your site then plan for the future and use a system like Google Tag Manager which will ensure you’re prepared for whatever new technologies may come.

Whatever your focus online be it showing off a product or service, or just sharing some insightful wisdom with the world, tags can be an enormous help. With all of the tools now freely available to help you with them, what are you waiting for; get tagging today!

Start properly measuring your website analytics with tagging today! Call SponsoredLinX on 1300 859 600 and get tagging.