Keeping Organized with Your Inbound Campaign Tagged Links Eric Patterson

I started to notice that keeping track of your different campaign tagged parameters can be a pain. This is especially true when you have multiple people in your organization generating campaign tagged inbound links. One of the widely talked about ways to keep track of your different parameters is with a spreadsheet which you share with your organization. Well that is a great tip, but I decided to go a step further and create a basic web form. The form collects the data into a database and then displays the options via drop down selection boxes for users. There are multiple benefits that we can do once we move to a web application so I will highlight a few of the benefits.

One of the benefits of the web application is the ability to setup the options for each parameter that makes sense for our business, and only make those options available for others that need to create a campaign tagged inbound link. No more worries about mistyping a value or users using different values because they forgot what they used last week. With the web form you can only select the values that have been added as an option to select. The other thing that we do is only allow authenticated users to create new values. This keeps a consistency with the naming conventions and more of a checks and balances model from within the organization. A good example of this is when we choose to use a parameter for its not defined usage. If you have read my previous post about campaign tagging, then you might remember that in most email based tagged links, I use the utm_content parameter for the name of the user's email whom the link is being used. So as the authenticated user, I can add all my organization's employees to the content list's data source. When an employee needs to create a link for their email then they just drop down the content selection and see their name. They don't even have to fully understand why their name is tied to the content parameter since it is an easy option for them to choose from.

Our second benefit is being able to dynamically create the campaign tagged link for the user. It can be time consuming when you have to go to the Google Analytics Url Builder and type in the parameter values you want, plus it can be user error prone. In my simple solution, the user selects the necessary preset values from a drop down selection box and the link gets auto-generated in a text box for an easy copy and paste solution. Choosing the drop down options is magnitudes faster and more productive then having to type in the values for the four parameters every time a campaign tagged link is needed. We all know that when a task becomes confusing and time consuming, then it probably won't get done. I have seen this over and over through the last few months so I felt creating the simple web form was a valuable resource for organizations out there.

The last benefit I wanted to mention was the use of external web applications with your links. The campaign tagged links can get fairly "ugly" and we don't like to have these shown to our potential viewers when possible. Luckily, most email applications and social media outlets allow us to use a different text value on top of our campaign tagged link. Sometimes you may not have this option and this why I implemented a bit.ly link generator to my web form. A bit.ly link is an encoded link that was first created when people needed to have shorter messages. The main place you see them is in twitter. Sure, we don't get to see our domain name in the link but we with an url shortening tool we can meet our 150 character max in our tweet and still have our link campaign tagged. Using bit.ly's programmers interface tools, I took the final created campaign tagged link and produced a very short (not so "ugly") link that you can copy and paste to use anywhere you see fit.

I see my new tool being very useful. Not only for me, but maybe for others out there that want something like this setup. If you already have a design team or firm then I am sure they can produce something like this in less then a day. Mine isn't really the prettiest web form you can build, but it is functional and really only meant to be seen by internal personal anyways. It has made my daily activities easier and I hope something like this can help you too. If you wish to see mine then feel free to go to: d2labs Analytic Url Builder.