Why and how to tag links

Posted by Josh on Thursday, October 1st, 2009.

When you create online advertising of any kind, it is possible to “tag” the ads in a way that website analytics software like Google Analytics and WebTrends can provide additional information about these traffic sources. For example, tagging can make it possible to tell exactly which ad among several provides the most online purchases or fills out the most information request forms. These tags are appended to the landing page URL associated with each ad. For example, the URL for an ad might be www.example.com/l_page.htm?myTag=TagValue which includes the landing page (www.example.com/l_page.htm) and a tag (myTag=TagValue).

Tags are not required for basic reporting of advertising performance, nor are they required for basic analysis of website visitors within the analytics software. However, having these tags does allow for additional levels of analysis such as calculation of ROI or ROAS, or for comparing different advertising campaigns.

Note that the usefulness of the tagging requires several things. First, there must be enough tags to correspond to the level of detail that is to be analyzed. For example, if there are only 2 ads, there only need to be 2 ad codes. A typical search engine advertising campaign can have 10’s of ad groups and 100’s of ads, so we need either 10’s or 100’s of ad codes to provide significant benefits. Second, even if we have the requisite number of tags, there needs to be enough traffic for each different tag to provide statistically meaningful results. Taken together, these two points often direct clients to provide fewer tags that represent groups of ads rather than each individual ad.

We always tags ads with our own tagging codes that often are sufficient for analysis with tools like Google Analytics, provided that the user of the tools knows how to make use of several advanced features. We are happy to provide our clients with information about these tags, and if needed we provide additional training and integration with existing systems that support them.