A great way to use this to your benefit would be the next time you are sending an email newsletter, as you might received hundreds of clicks through to your site, but these are usually tracked as direct visits if the urls are not tagged. It is always preferable to be able to separate these sources out so you can see deeper into the activity of people coming from a certain source compared to others. For instance, if we wanted to judge the success of a special we sent our using an emailer, it would be invaluable to know what the percentage was of people coming from search engines compared to those people you are in constant contact with. One would assume that the latter would be more likely to connect with your than outsiders seeing your site for the first time right? You might be surprised if you tested this theory and here is how you can tag url's to try...

Visit the url builder tool created by Google to make our lives a little easier. You can find it here. Now in the first field, enter the normal url of the page you want the link to point to. In source fill in "Newsletter" or "banner" or whatever the source of the traffic will be. Medium would be the method you are using, so put email for example, leave out Term and Content, and for Name, enter a title eg: "New Year Special". Then click Generate URL, and the tagged url will be created for you. This is the url you will insert in place of the normal url in step one. You will notice when visit the tagged url it goes to the correct page, the only difference is that Google Analytics will know that this visit came from an email newsletter with the name, New Years Special. You can then log into your Analytics account and see exactly what the people coming from that traffic source did on your website and what kind of quality visits they were.

Now it is possible for you to taylor your newsletters and landing pages, and better understand what impact they are having on your visitors. The web is fully trackable and measurable so why on earth would you want spend so much time compiling a newsletter, and so little time understanding the levels of its success on your business. If you knew 90% of people coming from a certain traffic source made a purchase, wouldn't you target those visitors more exclusively? I would.