How to Create Bulk Google UTM URLs

Bulk Google UTM Generator in Excel

Add another level of amazing insight into your website traffic by tagging your website links with Google Analytics UTM parameters. This is a must for me when I send out newsletters and launch paid campaigns. Read more to learn how to easily create bulk Google UTM URLs and download my free bulk Google UTM generator in Excel.

What Does UTM Stand for?

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. UTM parameters are tags that you add to your URL, so that Google Analytics can track when someone clicks on your link.

Without the UTM tags, you have no idea in Google Analytics that the visitor was driven to your site via an email campaign or paid social campaign or any other campaign you promoted on the web.

Manual Creation of Google UTM

In the past, I’d go to this campaign URL builder for Google Analytics. I’d paste in my URLs one-by-one and then paste the final Google UTM URL into my newsletter. Even for static links that never change such as my landing page, I’d continue to create the same UTM parameters over and over. Very manual!

This UTM generator site is great but very manual and slow. To save you and me some time, I created a spreadsheet that bulk creates the Google UTM URL. You can save this file and then just update as needed.

UTM Parameters in Google Analytics

The following UTM parameters are available at the link above and in the Excel download below. Campaign source is required, and the remaining field are optional but recommended depending on the type of campaign.

Campaign Source – The referrer (i.e. google, newsletter)
Campaign Medium – Marketing medium (i.e. cpc, email, banner ad)
Campaign Name – Product, slogan, etc. (i.e. July Sale)
Campaign Term – Identify the paid keywords in your campaign
Campaign Content – Use to differentiate ads

Google Analytics Campaign Tracking

I don’t know about you, but I love tracking the effectiveness of my email campaigns. For example, how many visitors, the average session duration, or even goal conversions can be tracked back to the UTM tagged URL.

To learn more about email campaign tracking, please see my post on how to track email campaigns with Google Analytics.

So please update your campaign links with the Google UTM codes and download the bulk Google UTM creator below. The insight is addicting!

Download

Discover Lead Magnet Ideas from Site Search Tracking in Google Analytics

Discover lead magnet ideas from Site Search Tracking in Google Analytics

A hidden but insightful tool within Google Analytics is Site Search Tracking. Sounds complicated but that’s just the search box or bar that you see on most websites to help you find content.

You can set up Google Analytics to track search usage on your website. More importantly, it provides the exact terms that users were searching for on your website. Wow, this is great insight into the mind of your readers or users.

For example, are users searching for a topic that you have not covered in your blog? Or is there a popular search team that could be become a great opt-in pop up box? Or is your site navigation a bit confusing that users have to search for content that you thought was obvious?

We recommend the free WordPress Plugin from Sumo.com to offer lead magnets and sign up boxes.

How to Set Up Site Search on your Website

FIRST

First, login to Google Analytics and navigate to the property that you’d like to set up. You’ll find this under View Settings in the View section of the Admin panel.

Navigate to Admin >> View >> View Settings

SECOND

After you have clicked on View Settings, scroll down to the Site Search Settings area. Turn on Site Search

Tracking.

Then enter the query parameter or word that designates a search on your site. Mine is an “s” but I also entered “q” to be safe. It could also be search or query. To find your query parameter, do a search on your site and look in the URL.

For more on this, click on the following Google help article.

Make sure you click “save” when finished.

THIRD

Now that Site Search is set up, it’ll take some to build up your site search history. Assuming you have some history, you can now view reports to see how many searches are being performed and for what words or terms. Great insight!

Navigate to Behavior >> Site Search >> Overview

FOURTH

You can check out the number of searches on your site, search terms, and what pages on your website that users are performing searches.

Oh, by the way, you might as well check “on” the box to exclude bots and spiders from your stats.

Turn On Bot Filtering in Google Analytics

How to Install Google Analytics Tracking Code

The only way to fully understand your site’s performance is with Google Analytics. To install Google Analytics tracking code, read this short guide to get started.

For beginners to Google Analytics, it might seem like a daunting challenge to get the infrastructure set-up. But with a little direction, it can be done. And before too long you will be receiving valuable traffic and performance reports for all the pages on your site.

What is the Google Analytics ID Tracking Code?

Google Analytics does offer some information about the ID Tracking Code. However, the instructions are quite technical and hard to interpret for a new user. But don’t sweat it – we have you covered!

1. Setting Up a User-ID

Setting up your tracking code is the first thing to do after signing up. In the Admin section of your Analytics homepage, you should see your account name linked to a site property.

Below the site property, notice the ‘Tracking Info’ headline. Click on it and select the ‘Tracking Code’ topic below the Tracking Info header. This is where your Tracking ID will be posted, in both an ID and HTML code form.

2. Paste Tracking Code to All Pages

Simply copy and paste this code onto the various pages of your site. In most cases it is placed above all the text in the <head> section of the site. If you are operating an e-commerce site via Shopify, they will provide clear instructions for where to apply a tracking code for the whole site.

If you are using WordPress, it is even easier! I recommend installing the Sumo or Google Analytics Dashboard for WP plugins. With these plugins, you simply copy and paste your tracking ID to the settings section of the plugin or authorize the plugin to use data from your Google Analytics account. No coding required.

Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin

3. Session Unification Is Helpful

Session unification is important because it ensures that when the same person searches for your site from two different platforms, Your Google Analytics software is able to associate them as coming from the same person, rather than two different people.

It is part of a larger User ID tracking system designed to streamline your customer insights, and as such makes for an important addition. To set it up, simply go to the Admin section of your Analytics account, click on User ID, and then select ‘Step 2’. You will see a toggle switch currently in the OFF position. Switch it to ON, and congratulations, you have just initiated session unification.

4. Verify that the Google Analytics Tracking Works

Once you have set everything up on the back end of your site, it’s time to verify that data is actually coming in! It takes approximately 24 hours for the first session views to be reported, and there are a couple of ways to ensure it’s all working for you.

Check the “Status” message on the page you applied the ID code to. If it states “Receiving traffic” then everything is as it should be.
Observe the number of people using your site right now in the Real-Time data section. To see if tracking works, simply browse through some pages of your site and see if they appear in the Real-Time data section.

Start Slow and Build Up a Solid Base

I hope this guide is useful to you when you install Google Analytics tracking code for your website. While it might take a few months to gather solid data on your site, by installing Google Analytics tracking, you are making it possible to optimize areas of your site you never thought possible.

Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics

SEO would be near impossible without access to site performance and traffic data. The free software that most search optimizers use is Google Analytics, a tool designed for analyzing all aspects of site performance. Google Analytics offers a ton a of important for any website owner or manager, so in our beginner’s guide to Google Analytics, we touch up on the highlights that it has to offer.

Offered up as a free software by the geniuses at Google, the best thing about Analytics is that you can isolate and solve key user experience issues – like site speed on mobile or bounce rate on a specific page – without having to conduct major site audits.

The data is all there for you as long as you know how to find it and interpret it!

This post is for those who have little to no experience with Google Analytics but want to start incorporating it into their site maintenance strategy. In our beginner’s guide to Google Analytics, we touch upon some of the many highlights of using Google Analytics.

How to Use Google Analytics in My Website

To install Google Analytics on your site you will need two things: access to the internet, and basic knowledge of HTML. If you would rather leave the HTML to your company’s webmaster or freelancer, that is an option too, but we promise it’s very easy!

To install the program, you first need to:

● Sign up for Google Analytics at Google’s Analytics Solution hub page.

● Make sure to link your most frequently used email, and one you plan to use for a long time. Just make sure you remain the only admin on the account.

● Begin on the New Account page by filling in the URL of your business, the industry it’s in, and the time zone you operate from (this helps with updates and tracking status reports)

● Read through the privacy report below the sign-up sheet and make sure everything jives with you.

Start Interpreting Performance Data

Now, you should have a fully functional account with tracking codes installed on every page. It should take a day or so for your site to sync up with Analytics, but before you know it, data will start flowing to it. Below is a snapshot of all the different metrics you can measure:

There are a total of five reporting categories, each with their sub-set of categories describing search session history. A few of the highlights include:

● Real-time users. You can track the real-time movements of people on your site to see if your tracking code is set up on all pages, if your one-day promotion is having the desired impact on search behavior, and get a clear idea where most of your traffic is coming from.

● Popular landing pages. In the ‘Acquisition’ category you can explore which landing pages on your site are most effective, and where the majority of this traffic comes from (social media or Google search).

Create Goals in Google Analytics

Collecting data is not all Analytics can do. You can set specific goals pertinent to your business needs.

A goal is defined by Google as “a page which a visitor reaches once they have completed an action”. It’s for this reason they are often referred to as conversions, or things like signing up for a newsletter or spend quality viewing time on a landing page you have optimized. It’s worth taking some time to explore your site traffic before designing a Funnel Path with key Entry Points based on your desired goal.

How to Read the Audience Overview Report

Lastly, it’s important to familiarize yourself with an Audience Overview Report. On the homepage, below ‘Customization’, you can select from nine different reports detailing customer behavior on the site. These are the bread and butter of GA and show you what is working and what is not with your Goals and overall web management strategy.

Start Understanding Your Website Traffic Today

At SeoHighLighter, we have mastered the understanding of Google Analytics, because we want to help your business grow. Our beginner’s guide to Google Analytics scratches the surface of what is available in GA.

Average Session Duration in Google Analytics

Th average session duration in Google Analytics is an often used metric to understand the engagement of your website audience. Per Google Analytics, it is calculated as:

Average Session Duration = total duration of all sessions (in seconds) / number of sessions

Engagement Hits on Last Page

As you enter the landing page of SeoHighLighter, for example, Google Analytics tracks the time from the first hit on the landing page to the last hit on the last page you visit. For example, you start on the landing page, check out the FAQ section, and then find yourself on this blog post. You read it and navigate back to Google.com. Because you left SeoHighLighter, Google Analytics can track the time at which you left this site.

Average Session Duration in GA

You’re Browsing and Leave for Lunch

However, what if you are browsing SeoHighLighter.com, for example, landed on the home page and are now reading this post and then leave for lunch. Google analytics has no clue how long you have spent reading this blog post.

Average Session Duration in Google Analytics

Basically, when you don’t click anything else on my site or navigate away from my site, it stops the session duration at the time you first entered this blog post (assuming it was the last page your are reading on my site and then left for lunch).

Also, if you have high bounce rates, your session duration will drop because, again, GA doesn’t know how long spent reading this post if there is no last engagement to record another point in time.

Finding Your Top Pages in Google Analytics

Find Your Top Pages in Google Analytics

Find your top pages in Google Analytics easily with this quick guide.

Google Analytics provides tremendous insight about your website visitors and content. One area of Google Analytics that I check constantly is my most popular content and pages. And, of course, you can also review your least popular content.

Understanding your most popular content can help you with your SEO strategy, content refreshes, calls to action, and much more. For your least popular content, it might also be an indication that you need to delete that content altogether, revise your page SEO, or revise the page or post to increase traffic or improve the specific goal for that content.

I’ll walk you through how to find your most popular content with SeoHighLighter and then with Google Analytics.

Finding your Top Pages in Google Analytics with SeoHighLighter

1) Login to SeoHighLighter at https://www.seohighlighter.com/customer/login.

2) Find the site that you would like to check in the navigation pane on the left and click on that site, and then click on “All Traffic.”

Navigation Pane

3) Scroll down slightly until you see the Traffic tabs and then click on Top Pages.

Top Pages in Google Analytics

4) You will see a list of your top pages that you can sort by key metrics.

Sign up for free today!

The data you can view on this page is below along with their definitions.

Pageviews – defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well.

Unique Pageviews – aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

Average Time on Page – the average amount of time users spent on a specified page or screen, or a set of pages or screens.

Entrances – is incremented on the first pageview or screen view hit of a session. In contrast, Sessions is incremented on the first hit of a session, regardless of hit type. Thus, there may be a discrepancy between Entrances and Pageviews or Screen views for properties where the first hit of a session can be an event hit.

Bounce Rate – is a single-page session on your site.

% Exit – For all pageviews to the page, Exit Rate is the percentage that were the last in the session

Page Value – is the average value for a page that a user visited before landing on the goal page or completing an Ecommerce transaction (or both). This value is intended to give you an idea of which page in your site contributed more to your site’s revenue

Finding your Most Popular Content with Google Analytics

1) Login to your Google Analytics account.
2) On the left navigation pane, click on Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages
3) This will serve a page with a chart and table showing your most popular content.