URL Tracking

URL Tracking in Vista Social helps you determine the impact of your digital campaigns so you can see the ROI of your social content and optimize accordingly. URL Tracking is a great way to prove how the work you’re doing on social directly impacts leads, sales and growth for your company. 

With URL Tracking, you create tracking rules to automatically append UTM parameters to your links in the posts you share in Vista Social. These parameters then add the tracking results in your analytics tools, such as Google Analytics.

URL Tracking Scenarios

To fully understand URL Tracking and its benefits, let’s look at a quick scenario.

La Carreta restaurant wants to measure traffic from the brand’s social channels to the site http://lacarreta.com/menu to see how many people visit the menu page. Thus the social media manager needs to create URL Tracking rules to ensure the traffic gets captured.

UTM parameters are used to track the effectiveness of a social campaign in analytics tools like Google Analytics. Vista Social enables social media managers to specify specific UTM parameters to capture this data.

The social media manager sets the utm_campaign parameter to a Custom Value and enters Menu.

For utm_source, they’ll leave the value as the default Social Network. The source shows as the name of the network the post is published to. For example, the source appears as “Twitter” when publishing to Twitter. If they were publishing to multiple networks, the networks appear in alphabetical order in a list separated by commas.

For utm_medium, they’ll leave the value as the default Social Account because any incoming traffic is resulting from posts to one of the social channels.

Finally, they’ll define utm_content as a Unique ID for the value. This means Vista Social generates a unique ID every time the link is used, so any incoming traffic is attributed to specific outgoing messages.

Now, they’ll review a live preview of the link to verify the correct tracking information appears. They’ll click Save to save the tracking rules. Now whenever the link http://lacarreta.com/menu is added to Compose, the URL Tracking rules are automatically applied and traffic is captured in Google Analytics.

Creating URL Tracking Rules

In order to automatically add the tracking parameters to the links you share in Vista Social, you must create URL Tracking Rules. With these rules, you can specify the social network, account and other values to ensure you’re properly tracking links. 

To create new URL tracking rules:

1. Navigate to Settings > Publishing Settings.
2. Click Add URL under URL Tracking. The Add URL Tracking popup appears.
3. Enter the URL you want to track. When you add this URL to your posts in compose, the UTM parameters you define get automatically appended to the URL in Compose.
4. Define your default parameters. Default parameters include the campaign name, source and medium. To do this:
   1. Select the value you want to use from the dropdown. Choose from:
      • Social Network
      • Social Account
      • Message Tags
      • Unique ID
      • First 25 Characters of Post
      • Custom Value
   2. Enter any additional information for the value you select.
   3. Select whether to enable or disable the parameter.
5. (Optional) To define any custom parameters:
   1. Specify a parameter name of at most 100 characters.
   2. Select the value you want to use from the dropdown.
   3. Enter any additional information for the value you select.
6. Click Save.

After you save your URL tracking rules, the UTM parameters you define are automatically added in the Attached Link area and the message text area in Compose. 

Google Analytics

To view your URL Tracking data in Google Analytics, navigate to Reporting > Acquisition > Campaigns. Here, you can sort and analyze campaign data by:

• Campaign
• Source
• Medium
• Content (Ad Content)

to evaluate the performance and ROI of your social campaigns sent from Vista Social.