Would you like to know which of your emails and posts are converting people best? You need tracking! But I guess that's why you're here. Here's how you use tracking within Impact Stack.
In this article we'll mention how the Impact Stack tracking connects to Google Analytics tracking. If you'd like to know more specifically about Google Analytics, there's lots of information available elsewhere, or you might also find our article about web analytics for campaigning and fundraising useful, it goes into some depth about Google Analytics.
Here, we'll focus on tracking in Impact Stack.
Within Impact Stack you can track up to three tracking parameters in your links. To make life super simple for you, we use exactly the same format as Google Analytics tracking. This means when you track for one you automatically track for the other. The tracking parameters Impact Stack records are:
- utm_source
- utm_campaign
- utm_term
- utm_medium
- utm_content
Note: It doesn't matter if you don't use Google Analytics, the Impact Stack tracking works exactly the same.
Building the URL
When building the URL you can use as many or as few terms as you want, but you can only use each once per URL. What's important is that the terms are separated by an '&' and that there is a '?' just once at the start of the tracking. e.g.
www.YourImpactStackURL.com?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=B010618&utm_term=PSlink
You can use our UTM link generator on our toolkit here to help build the URL:
https://toolkit.impact-stack.org/tracking-link
Deciding how to use the parameters
Although Google offers some advice on how it wants you to use these, they're basically a blank slate to use as you want. The important thing is consistency. It's important that you make a decision in your organisation about how you will be using each of these parameters, then stay really consistent about it. It will make you much happier and save many headaches down the line.
For great tracking, it's advisable to assign codes to every communication you send. These don't need to be public, just noted down somewhere internally. Whether you're looking to track emails, social media posts or something else, consistent naming criteria are always a great idea.
For example B010618 might be the code you assign to an email about bees sent on 1st June 2018. Tw010618 might be the code you use for a tweet sent the same day. The way you create and use these codes it totally up to you, just choose something that makes sense and make sure everyone follows the same system.
One approach you might take to tracking is:
- utm_source = the channel, e.g. Email, Twitter etc
- utm_campaign = Exactly which communication on this channel, e.g. which specific email
- utm_term = e.g.which link they clicked within an email
Here's how this might look:
www.YourImpactStackURL.com?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=B010618&utm_term=PSlink
Or if you were doing A/B testing and sent out two versions of B010618, you might use:
www.YourImpactStackURL.com?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=B010618v1&utm_term=PSlink
www.YourImpactStackURL.com?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=B010618v2&utm_term=PSlink
You can then see these trackers in Google Analytics AND in your Impact Stack downloads.
If your tracked links are going to be visible to the supporter (e.g. printed on something or in a tweet), you can make them beautiful using a link shortener or a redirect, but if they're just hyperlinks on text or buttons, it's probably not necessary.
How to see the results in Impact Stack
So you've written your tracked links, sent them to your supporters and you want to see who converted. Maybe you sent out two versions of the email and want to see which converted more people?
Simply visit your campaign page and download a csv of the results. You'll see that the the tracking parameters have populated into their CSV columns, which are:
utm_campaign = populates into the export column "Campaign"
utm_medium = populates into the export column "Channel"
utm_content = populates into the export column "Version"
utm_source = populates into the export column "Source"
utm_term = populated into the export column "Terms"
Once you have the CSV file you can analyse this raw data however you want. For example you could use a countif formula or a pivot table to see how many people were converting on each tracker.
Combining tracking with pre-population
If you're also using form pre-population, you want to add the population code after the tracking code. You can read more about pre-population here. Here's how the final link might look:
www.YourImpact-StackURL.com?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=B010618&utm_term=PSlink#p:first_name=*|FNAME|*&p:last_name=*|LNAME|*&p:email=*|EMAIL|*
You can use the pre-population link generator on our toolkit to help make this URL:
https://toolkit.impact-stack.org/prepopulation-link
Read more
- Our article on Web analytics for campaigning and fundraising
Comments