Measuring the effectiveness of your internet marketing campaign is easier than you think. I’ll give you a quick low-down on how to do this using Google Analytics.

Traffic driven to your website by marketing campaigns can be segmented and analyzed individually. This will give you a clear picture of the effectiveness of each campaign, including ROI if you’re tracking goals.

To track campaigns you need to create a unique target URL for each link or destination in your campaign.

Google URL BuilderA typical URL will look like this: http://www.isl.ca/en/home/default.aspx?utm_source=Yahoo%2BCanada&utm_medium=Banner%2BAd&utm_content=50%25%2Boff&utm_campaign=Christmas%2BSale

The information after the questionmark  identifies campaign attributes, but still directs the visitor to the ISL home page. Fortunately you don’t have to create the URL manually. Google provides a great URL building tool  that makes this easy.

View an example of how to use the Google URL builder.

1. Enter the web address where you want the visitors to land on your site
2. Fill out the campaign information as the boxes indicate

Spend some time considering how you want to identify your campaigns, especially if you’re running a number of campaigns. A good naming convention will make it much easier to differentiate your campaigns in your analytics reports. You only need to include the Campaign Term field when you’re using paid keywords that are not on Google’s Adsense network. Adsense campaigns are tracked automatically when you enable that feature in your Adsense account.

By default, your traffic is segmented by  the Campaign Name in Google Analytics reports. You can use the ‘Dimension’ drop down box to change how you analyze your campaign. You can view all campaigns by Source, Medium, Content, and Campaign term.

This screenshot shows a campaign overview

You can drill further into your campaign performance to see how these visitors behaved relative to other visitors on the site. This is where you get a real indication of the performance of the campaign.

From this report you can see that the campaign we ran performed very well as visitors from this campaign had much better metrics than the average site visitor.