Google Analytics is a very popular and very powerful tool for data tracking and analysis. Every website should be running some kind of tracking and analysis software to understand who uses it and how, and Google Analytics is by far the most popular choice. This is with good reason, as it has many powerful tools to help make use of the data it tracks.
Tracking visitors from Facebook
When you run marketing and ad campaigns, you want to be sure you’ve optimised your ads so that you’re getting the most from your ad spend. Understanding how well your ads are performing is crucial, but for that, you need to know how to reliably feed visitor data from Facebook Ad campaigns through to Google Analytics. In short? You need parameters.
Using URL parameters in Google Analytics
Google Analytics makes tracking all sorts of data possible through URL parameters. Fortunately, Google also provides a Campaign URL Builder tool to help you generate Google Analytics optimised URLs.
Specify custom parameters
Google Analytics allows you to mark your visitors by source and track parameters such as ad, ad set and campaign. These can all be built into the URL. Just make sure to use “facebook” for the campaign source and “cpc” or “cpm” as your campaign medium. Once you have filled out everything, the URL generator will create the URL you need to use for your ads. You simply then use the URLs it generates as the external link for your Facebook ads then data will be gathered automatically.
Tracking parameters in Google Analytics
Once your ads are public and people begin to click on your ads through your custom URLs, you’ll be able to see the results in Google Analytics. Simply go to Acquisitions, click on All Traffic, click on Source/Medium and then from Primary Dimension, click on ‘Other’ and use Acquisition group.
Once you are done, you will be able to use the feature-rich Google Analytics toolkit to specifically analyse your Facebook visitors. This will give you a wealth of data on how well your Facebook ad campaign is doing. It can tell you how many people are responding to ads, what sort of demographics are responding to your ads and how those visitors are then using your website. Crucially, you can find out how many leads actually generate sales or conversions. More data allows higher refinement of campaigns and lower costs.
