How effective are your links for building traffic?

You can spend hours every day building traffic to your website by leaving comments, tweeting, sending out emails, or purchasing banner ads.  And, all that work usually pays off if you’ve got a great site with quality content.  But, how do you know which of your efforts are paying off and which are wasting your time?

There’s one easy way to track this, but it’s seldom used among bloggers: the Google URL Builder.

The Google URL Builder allows you to “tag” your links with certain terms so that you can look at your Google Analytics reports and see how those links perform.  Here’s an example:

Let’s say that Savvy Blogging wants to put an ad on ProBlogger’s site.  So, they create a smashing banner ad and link it to www.SavvyBlogging.net.  Great – ProBlogger starts running the ad, and Savvy Blogging can look in their Google Analytics account to see how many referrals they get from ProBlogger.net and determine the effectiveness of their campaign.

But what if Savvy Blogging has a really incredible post that ProBlogger decides to link to within one of his posts?  That’s going to generate much more traffic than the banner ad, but it’s going to be pretty difficult to separate out which traffic came from the banner ad and which came from the direct link within the post.

Savvy Blogging might think their banner ad campaign was a huge success, when in reality most of the traffic might have come from the link in the post.

Enter the URL Builder

To track the effectiveness of the specific links you place around the web, tag the links with the Campaign Source, Medium, and even more specific terms if desired, using the URL Builder.  This takes a link like this:

www.savvyblogging.net

to this:

http://savvyblogging.net/?utm_source=ProBlogger&utm_medium=125×125%2BBanner%2BAd&utm_campaign=Pro%2BBlogger%2BAd%2BCampaign

When we’ve used the tagged link, we can login to Google Analytics, click on Traffic Sources > Campaigns, and then you’ll see the statistics for all the campaigns you are running.  You can also choose to sort by Source, Medium, Keyword, Ad Content, Visitor Type, or Landing Page – all different things you can include in the tagging of your link.

You’ll be able to look at the number of referrals from those specific tagged links, the bounce rate of the visitors from those links, their time on site, and more.  Now you can finally tell what traffic-building efforts are actually yielding the results you want!

When To Use It

Obviously, you may not want to take the time to tag every single link you place around the internet.  And, it would be confusing to track hundreds of different campaigns.

But, it’s a great idea to track your efforts for a few weeks to see what’s really getting a good return on your investment.  Consider using tagged links in:

• Your email signature
• Banner ads
• Guest posts
• Comment forms
• Social media
• Your Feedblitz email template
• Linkups

Try it!  You may find that a few extra seconds of work building a tagged URL may actually save you some time in the future by helping you know what’s paying off in traffic for your site.

Carrie Isaac blogs about coupons and deals in Colorado Springs at Springs Bargains and is the creator of the Grocery University audio e-course.  She cannot wait until summer 2010 for the Savvy Blogging Summit to come to her beautiful city!