Tagging Links So You Know What Worked

What a tagged link is

An ordinary link with extra information appended after a question mark.

The page loads exactly as normal, and analytics reads the extra information and records where the visitor came from.

Which converts traffic that would otherwise appear as direct, or as an ambiguous referral, into something clearly identified.

The parameters are a long-standing convention that every analytics tool understands, so this works regardless of which one you happen to use.

The parameters worth using

• Source, where it came from: newsletter, linkedin, chamber.
• Medium, the kind of thing: email, social, referral, print.
• Campaign, the specific effort: spring-service, autumn-reminder.

Three is enough for a small business. Two more exist for advertising and are rarely needed outside it.

Source and medium are the ones that appear most usefully in reports, and campaign groups things together when you run something specific.

Where to use them

Anywhere you control the link and the destination is your own site.

Your email signature, which is a surprising volume of traffic over a year and currently arrives as direct.

Every link in a newsletter, which most email services will add automatically if asked.

Links from your own social profiles and posts.

Your entry in a directory or a trade association listing, where you supplied the address.

And a supplier or partner page that links to you, where you can simply ask them to use the tagged version of the address.

Where not to use them

Two situations where tagging causes harm rather than helping.

Internal links between your own pages. Tagging those restarts the session and overwrites the original source, so a visitor who arrived from a search is reattributed to your own site.

That is a genuine and common error, and it destroys the very data you were trying to collect.

And any link somebody else will share onward, since the tag travels with it and everybody who receives it is attributed to the original campaign.

Which means a tagged link posted publicly and then shared produces attribution that looks precise and is wrong.

A worked example

A business whose analytics showed over half its traffic as direct.

They tagged four things: the link in their email signature, the links in their quarterly newsletter, their entry in a trade directory, and their social profile.

Within two months, the direct proportion had fallen substantially and three identified sources appeared.

The trade directory, which they had been considering cancelling, turned out to be sending a steady flow of visitors who read several pages.

The email signature was sending more than expected, mostly to the pricing page, which suggested people were checking prices after correspondence.

Both of those were invisible the previous month and neither required any new spending to discover.

Building the links

Mechanically simple, and there are three ways depending on how often you do it.

By hand, appending the parameters after a question mark, which is fine for the four or five links most small businesses tag.

With a free builder tool, which produces the link from fields and prevents typing errors.

Or automatically, which most email services offer as a setting that tags every link in a newsletter without any manual work.

The third is worth turning on immediately if you send anything, since it removes the discipline requirement entirely.

Naming things consistently

The discipline that decides whether the reports are readable.

Parameters are case sensitive in most tools, so Newsletter and newsletter appear as two separate sources.

Which produces a report listing the same thing four ways within a year, because different people tagged different links differently.

The convention: lower case throughout, hyphens rather than spaces, and a short written list of the source and medium names you use.

That list is the whole of what makes this maintainable, and it takes ten minutes to write and prevents years of untidiness.

Tags that leak

A small failure worth knowing about, since it corrupts data quietly.

A tagged link, once visited, sits in the address bar. If somebody copies it and passes it on, everybody who follows it is attributed to the original campaign.

Which is how a newsletter tag ends up credited with traffic from a forum post six months later.

Nothing prevents it entirely, and being aware of it stops you over-trusting a source that appears to be performing unusually well.

The counter-case

Where it is not worth doing.

A business with very little traffic, where dividing small numbers into four sources produces figures that move for no reason.

Links in printed material, which cannot carry a tag usefully since nobody types a long address. A short memorable address that redirects is the equivalent.

And anywhere the answer is already known, such as a business whose owner speaks to every customer.

The value is highest for a business running several channels simultaneously with no way at all to tell which of them is producing anything.

What the reports show afterwards

Worth knowing what to expect, since the payoff is not immediate.

Tagged traffic appears under campaigns or acquisition, grouped by the source and medium you supplied.

Which means the report is only as informative as the naming, and a month of tagging produces a list you can read at a glance.

What is more useful than the visit counts is what those visitors did: whether traffic from the directory converts at a different rate from traffic from the newsletter.

That comparison is the point of the exercise, and it needs your conversion events working, which is why the two jobs belong together.

Without events, tagging tells you where people came from and nothing about whether any of them were worth having.

Keeping the links tidy

A practical objection worth addressing.

Tagged links are long and untidy, which matters where somebody sees the address.

In an email signature or a newsletter, the link is behind text and the length is invisible.

Where the address is displayed, a shortener produces a tidy link that still carries the tag, at the cost of a third-party dependency and a slight loss of trust, since shortened links obscure the destination.

For most small business use, the links are behind text and the question does not arise.

Setting it up

1. Write your source and medium list first.
2. Tag your email signature.
3. Turn on tagging in your email service.
4. Tag your directory and profile links.
5. Never tag internal links.
6. Check the report after a month.

The fifth is the only one on the list that can actively do damage, and it is the one people do accidentally when adding tags to a menu item or a button on their own site.

Why the untagged traffic is misleading is covered in where your visitors came from.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.