UTM Campaign tags: marketing pixie dust that you control!

If you’ve hung around here for a while, you’ll have heard a little about UTM Campaign Tags. They are the magic ingredient for making sure that visits from Instagram, Pinterest and anywhere else show up in your Google Analytics reports correctly.

Why doesn’t this happen right in the first place??

To know where a visitor came from, Google Analytics has to listen in to the conversation happening between the visitor’s browser and your website. Often this conversation includes information about the last page the visitor looked at (their traffic source).

This is called “referral” information.

But sometimes, for a whole bunch of technical reasons, it doesn’t have this information or it’s wrong. In many of these cases, the visit will be attributed as “direct” traffic (the catch-all black hole bucket of mystery visits!) and you’ll never know if your marketing actually worked.

Campaign tags let us control all the information about the source of the visit and leave nothing to chance.

See? Magic!

Keep reading to find out how and where to use campaign tags for marketing your handmade shop!

This article has been updated for Google Analytics 4. (You don’t need to change your tagged links!)

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How to measure visitors from Pinterest to your handmade products

Pinterest is a wonderful and fun tool for collecting inspiration and aspiration… so it only makes sense that it’s also a fantastic marketing channel for your handmade stores! But how much traffic does it generate?

Find out how to measure your Pinterest visitors more reliably and control how they appear in your Google Analytics reports.

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Understand your Etsy audience with Google Analytics Demographics

OUT OF DATE: These instructions were originally provided for Universal Analytics. This version of Google Analytics is no longer available.

The equivalent feature in Google Analytics 4 is now Google Signals. Learn more about enabling and using Google Signals in GA4 (InfoTrust).


Google Analytics lets us see all sorts of interesting things about our visitors, like where they came from, what city they’re in, or what search term they used. But there’s a whole bunch of information that you’ve probably never seen!

Demographics.

Yep, that’s gender, age & interests straight into your Analytics reports!

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How to Measure your Shop Visitors from Instagram

If you have a boutique ecommerce shop, you probably use Instagram.

But if you look in Google Analytics, you’ll see close to no traffic from this supposedly wonderful handmade-marketing-engine. What’s going on?

Is it a failure? Or are your Instagram visitors just hidden?

When somebody taps the link in your profile and it opens your shop, Instagram doesn’t pass on any “referral” information to your shop. It doesn’t tell it that Instagram opened that link. As far as your shop is concerned, and therefore your Google Analytics tracking code and even Etsy Shop Stats (for Etsy sellers), that person may as well have opened up their mobile web browser and manually typed your shop address in.

In other words, Google Analytics and Shop Stats track that as a Direct visit.

And you have no idea which of all your Direct visits came from Instagram. You can guess by looking at which ones came from mobiles or tablets, but it’s not reliable.

This is where campaign (or UTM) tagging comes in.

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