A Quick Guide to Google URL Builder

If you’ve ever been trying to figure out a simple way to track something so that it will show up in Google Analytics, there’s a pretty simple solution: Google URL Builder.

This handy tool from Google makes this incredibly simple and painless to set up, and will take you all of about 2 minutes, with 1 of those minutes being to open your web browser.

You can access the free tool here.

While Google provides a number of further parameter options you can add to track your campaign, for the purposes of our explanation, let’s keep this really simple.

There are 3 main things you will need: Campaign, Source, and Medium.

Let’s take a look at an example. Let’s say that we are running a Spring Sale for running shoes and we are running this campaign using Paid Online Ads on both Google and Bing.

So for the purposes of this exercise:

Campaign = Spring Sale for Running Shoes

Source = Google

Medium = Online Ads

When we enter this into the tool, we get the following URL:

https://www.rtraction.com?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=Paid+Online+Ads&…

Now, what does this all mean?

If we use this URL for our online campaigns (note: online ads will do this by default, so this is just for demonstration purposes), when they are clicked they will display in your Google Analytics Universal Account under Acquisition > Campaigns.



From here, we can see all of the traffic data available for this campaign and see which source or medium was the most effective as we can drill into all the data available.