How do I use the Google Analytics URL Builder?

The Google Analytics URL Builder is a free tool by Google designed to help Google Analytics identify traffic from different sources. See the tool here.

On a technical level, it is very easy to use. First, add the URLs you want to send traffic to and fill in all the other fields (Campaign Source, Campaign Medium, Campaign Name, Campaign Term, Campaign Content). Based on the information you add, the Google Analytics URL Builder will generate a link for you. Anyone who follows that link will be identified on Google Analytics as coming from the traffic source you entered into the URL Builder. You can try this yourself and see the traffic source in Google Analytics’ real-time view.

However, in real life, you may have many campaigns running on different platforms, and if you generate each URL with the help of the URL Builder, you will probably end up with URLs for plenty of different traffic sources, some of which differ by one or two letters, lettercase or dashes and spaces, but are actually same campaign. This is problematic as you will not be able to build meaningful reports in Google Analytics because the same traffic source will be displayed as two or three different traffic sources (conversely, there can also be cases in which different traffic sources are displayed as same traffic source).

To avoid this situation, it is best to develop some naming convention and use a spreadsheet to keep track of all the destination URLs that you use across multiple platforms. See here for an example of such a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet makes it possible to set utm-sources and utm-medium in the configuration sheet and keep a list of all the URLs that are used for different campaigns.