Which Three Tags Does Google Analytics Require for Accurate Campaign Tracking?
Which Three Tags Does Google Analytics Require for Accurate Campaign Tracking?
The three tags Google Analytics requires for accurate campaign tracking are Medium, Source, and Campaign
1. Medium or UTM_Medium. Google Analytics (GA4) requires the Medium or UTM_Medium tag to be present in your destination URL for accurate campaign tracking across channels.
- The Medium tag, or UTM_Medium indicates the channel which generates visitor traffic to your website.
- You need to include a medium tag in all of your destination URLs because without it, Google Analytics will not know which channel to attribute this traffic to, and you will end up with incomplete reports with an “Unspecified” traffic.
3 Key UTM_Medium Takeaways
Ensure Parity
The Medium tags manually added in your campaign’s destination URLs have to align with your GA4 channels to avoid under-reporting. Learn the 6 easy steps to a great campaign tracking strategy.
Avoid Issues
Watch this video to see why marketing campaign traffic will get lost if your UTM_Medium Tags in the destination URLs are not the same as your Google Analytics Channels
Drive Success
Read this tutorial to learn more about the utm_medium tag and how to use it to ensure your reporting is always accurate, consistent and generating the insights you need to drive marketing ROI.
Watch: How to avoid incorrectly setting up your UTM_Medium:
2. Source or UTM_Source. Google Analytics requires the Source or UTM_Source tag to be included in your destination URL for accurate campaign tracking across each web source.
- The Source tag, or UTM_Source shows you all the external websites or web properties that generated visits to your own website or app.
- Together with the Medium tag, when added to a destination URL, Source helps you get more granular understanding about the most valuable website referrers.
3 Key UTM_Source Takeaways
Ensure Consistency
The UTM Source tags in your destination URLs should have the same format to avoid putting traffic in multiple buckets. Learn the 6 easy steps to a great campaign tracking strategy.
Become a Pro
Read this blog to learn more about all of the key UTM parameters that you can use to track campaign performance and how each tag is included in your website destination URL.
Drive Success
Read this tutorial to learn more about the utm_source tag and how to use it to ensure your reporting is always accurate, consistent and generating the insights you need to drive marketing ROI.
3. Campaign Name or UTM_Campaign. Google Analytics requires the name of your campaign to be included in your destination URL, so that it can put all traffic associated with the campaign in one bucket.
- The Campaign Name tag, or UTM_Campaign, is mandatory for your destination URL.
- Without it all your traffic will be send to the general “referrer” traffic and all your hard work in implementing the campaign will be lost – you won’t be able to showcase how much traffic and conversions you generated!!
3 Key Campaign Tracking Takeaways
Learn More
The UTM Campaign tags is key to your reporting, especially if it needs to include a lot of granular information about your company. Watch this video to learn about the four ways to build your utm_campaign tag.
Become a Pro
Read this blog to learn more about the campaign tag and how you can easily set up all your campaign tracking for successful reporting once you ensure consistent naming conventions.
Drive Success
Learn more about our CampaignTrackly UTM Builder platform and how it helps businesses like yours automate fully campaign tracking, adding tags to destination URLs and more.
Additional resources you might want to look into:
- Learn how to enable your primary GA4 channel group:
- https://regexr.com/ – makes it super easy to troubleshoot sources and mediums when you don’t know how to deal with the pesky regex (regular expression) formulas.
- GA 4’s guide to how they group traffic/visits/clicks by source and medium in default channels: https://support.google.com/analytics/…
- CampaignTrackly’s video resources that can walk you through GA4 and how easy it is for you to find your campaigns in the GA4 platform.