You probably already measure your external campaigns (if not, it’s never too late, do it now!). But what about your internal campaigns? Even though a campaign is internal, on your own website, there’s no reason for not measuring it. Banners and text links consume some of your precious web estate. Do you maximize their potential?

Leveraging power of internal site search

Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn’t offer any out-of-the-box solution to follow internal campaigns. Some workarounds have already been discussed, here or here. However, none is really effective:

• Using a virtual page name through a call to trackPageview() to record clicks has downsides. First, you increase artificially the number of page views. Worse, by using virtual page views, there’s no convenient way to determine the most important: goal completion? Time on site after click? Even advanced segments cannot fully answer to those questions.
• Adding campaign query parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) is not better. Indeed, it overwrites (at least theoretically) original parameters. Bad: you don’t want to lose the origin of your visitors, do you? And anyway, Google Analytics doesn’t like at all when campaign parameters are overwritten within a session, leading to erroneous results, as shown by our tests regarding overwritten campaign parameters in Google Analytics.

A much better way consists in using “site search” report to measure internal campaigns. It’s so powerful and though so easy to put in place. By the way, others have already shown how to use it to measure impact of sections and pages.

Implement the change in few minutes

Consider this example: Business on the Go. We were wondering whether or not the rollover was clicked. On the previous version of the website, it stood like this:

Site Overlay couldn’t answer this question since rollover was in Javascript, which Site Overlay doesn’t like at all. Neither did “Navigation Summary” report since there were too many links on the home page. Best solution? Add specific parameters to the banners.

Each link, either text or banner, had been edited as follow:

• wp_blackberry_bb8130.asp?utm_internal_element=BlackBerry+8130&utm_internal_campaign=home+page+rollover

Two parameters have been added to original URL:

• utm_internal_element : Identifiy products. Which ones are better?
• utm_internal_campaign : “home+page+rollover”. Do you run a larger campaign throughout your website? Did you place a bunch of links around there? Aggregate them using this parameter.

Optimize your web estate

Simply configure your site search reports accordingly: search term = utm_internal_element and search category = utm_internal_campaign. Make sure you use additional profiles if necessary so that you don’t mess up your existing site search data.
Your data about products clicked within the rollover will look like this:

Better, if you’ve configured some goals, don’t forget to have a look:

By analyzing search category results, we were able to determine that rollover got more clicks than the main banner on the website. What a surprise! As a consequence, during website redesign, the rollover has been made more prominent:

Result? Click-through rate on rollover to product pages has increased by 18% since the redesign.

This post was written by Alex