Overview
This document covers how to customize the elements that are displayed in the Traffic Sources section of the Google Analytics reporting interface. Google Analytics tracks traffic to your website from two basic referring sources:
- organic
Organic campaigns can come from an unpaid search engine results link, a referral from another website (such as a blog) and direct traffic.
- paid
Paid campaigns can come from AdWords, paid search engine keywords, or paid ad campaigns from non-Adwords providers.
Once a user reaches your site from one of these sources, that user's visit is tagged with a campaign tracking cookie as coming from that source. In addition, Analytics treats paid campaign visits from different sources as follows:
- Source precedence—A direct traffic visit that follows a paid referred visit will never override an existing paid campaign. Whatever is the latest paid campaign visit is listed as the referral for the visit.
- Campaign precedence—Each visit to your site from a different paid source—such as from a paid search engine link, an Adwords link, or a banner ad—overrides the campaign cookie information set by a previous source.
- One Campaign Per Session—Each visit to
your site from a different campaign—organic or
paid—triggers a new session, regardless of the actual time
elapsed in the current session. Specifically, a change in value for
any of the following campaign URL parameters triggers a new
session:
utm_source,utm_medium,utm_term,utm_content,utm_id,utm_campaign,gclid. For more information on sessions, see Sessions in our Help Center.
Campaign Tracking
In its broadest definition, campaign tracking refers to a method of identifying how users discover your site. Specifically, you use campaign tracking in Google Analytics to accurately track online advertising campaigns to your website, both from AdWords-generated campaigns as well as from other advertising sources. You can use some of the campaign tracking customizations to adjust whether subsequent ad referrals override earlier referrals to your site, either organic or paid.
Before configuring campaign tracking using the ga.js campaign
tracking settings, you should understand how campaign tracking works in general
and how you can best use it to track advertising referrals to your site. The
following table lists a number of articles in the Help Center that describe
campaign tracking. The rest of this section describes campaign tracking settings
specific to the ga.js tracking code.
| Article | Description |
|---|---|
| How Campaign Tracking Works | Describes the process of campaign tracking, from setting up and parsing a link, to logging campaign data in the Analytics reporting and associating campaigns with goals in order to track user conversion. |
| Tagging Your Destination URLs | Describes how to enable/disable auto-tagging for your AdWords campaigns and provides information for how to manually tag destination URLs. |
| URL Builder Tool | Tool you can use to automatically generate a campaign tracking URL if necessary. |
| Best Practices for Tagging Links | Describes how to employ effective link tagging for non-AdWords campaigns. See the information in this section for details on how to use ga.js method calls to use your own campaign tracking variables with this model. |
General Campaign Features
Use these methods to control general characteristics of campaign behavior on your entire site or a set of pages.
| Feature | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Disable Campaign Tracking | _setCampaignTrack() | Campaign tracking is enabled by default, but you can use this method to disable campaign tracking and its associated cookies for a given page or pages. |
| Anchors in URLs | _setAllowAnchor() | Set this method to use the # sign as a query string delimiter in campaign tracking URLs. This method allows you to get reporting data
for campaign tracking parameters even if your site doesn't support query
parameters. For example, if your webserver hosts static content for speed
in page delivery, you will not be able to retrieve campaign tracking
data using the conventional query strings. In this case, you can use
the |
| Set Campaign Timeout | _setCampaignCookieTimeout() | By default, campaigns are tracked for 6 months, so that you can determine over a 6-month period if visitors to your site convert based on a specific campaign. However, you can use this method to adjust the tracking life span for your campaigns. |
| Campaign Overrides | _setCampNOKey | By default, the most recent ad impression is the campaign that is credited in your conversion tracking. If you prefer to associate the first-most impressions to a conversion, use this method. |
Custom Campaign Tracking
Google Analytics automatically collects your Google AdWords data if
you have linked your Adwords account to your Analytics account. If
you have non-AdWords keyword links using other advertising sources,
or if you want to track user clicks to your site from email
campaigns or similar sources, you can create custom campaigns using
the URL
Builder Tool. The tables below describe the ga.js
methods you can use to create customize campaign tracking behavior
for your site. See
the Campaign
Tracking Reference for specific examples for these methods.
| Variable Type | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign Name | _setCampNameKey | This variable is used to define the name of your campaign, which appears in the Analytics reports on the top-level campaign report. |
| Campaign Source | _setCampSourceKey | The source variable is typically used to define where the campaign is originating from, such as a website name or a company. For all campaigns, or for a particular campaign, this appears as Source under the Segment pull-down in the Analytics Reports. |
| Campaign Medium | _setCampMediumKey | Typically used to define the type of the campaign, such as a banner ad, email campaign, or click ad. For all campaigns, or for a particular campaign, this appears as Keyword under the Segment pull-down in the Analytics Reports. |
| Campaign Term | _setCampTermKey | Defines the keyword terms for that ad. For all campaigns, or for a particular campaign, this appears as Keyword under the Segment pull-down in the Analytics Reports. |
| Campaign Content | _setCampContentKey | Typically used to set the content description for that campaign ad. For all campaigns, or for a particular campaign, this appears as Ad Content under the Segment pull-down in the Analytics Reports. |