Create and analyze tracking URLs

Tracking URLs help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Use them when you're directing traffic to a page with the HubSpot tracking code from somewhere other than a call-to-action on your own site, like an email blast, PPC campaign, banner ad, and so forth. A tracking URL is a normal URL with parameters attached to it. When visitors come to your site from a tracking URL, HubSpot shows that traffic in the sources report.

• Create a tracking URL
• Add a tracking URL to your content
• Analyze your tracking URLs

Create a tracking URL

• In your HubSpot account, navigate to Reports > Analytics Tools.
• Click Tracking URL Builder.
• Click Create tracking URL. 
• Set up your tracking URL:
  • Enter a valid URL for your page in the URL field, including the protocol (http:// or https://). This can be the URL of any page with the HubSpot tracking code on it. 
  • Click the UTM Campaign dropdown menu and select the HubSpot campaign you want visits to this tracking URL to be bucketed under in your sources report.

  Please note: a campaign name is required when creating tracking a URL because the campaign name is used in several reports in HubSpot. Visits to the tracking URL will be attributed to this campaign in the sources report and will count towards the analytics for the campaign in the campaigns tool. 

  • Click the UTM Source dropdown menu and select the source for your tracking URL. Learn how sources are categorized in the sources report. 
  • The UTM Medium field is optional. Enter the name of your banner ad, social post, email, etc. For sources bucketed under Other Campaigns, the medium is visible when you drill down into a specific campaign. This is typically the last visible parameter in your tracking URLs that you build in HubSpot.
  • The UTM Term field is optional. It can be used in systems like AdWords and Google Analytics to track the keywords in a pay-per-click ad.
  • The UTM Content field is optional. Enter a name for an ad if you have multiple on your page and want to differentiate between them.  
• Click Save. 

Add a tracking URL to your content

• In your HubSpot account, navigate to Reports > Analytics Tools.
• Click Tracking URL Builder.
• Hover over your tracking URL, click the Actions dropdown menu, and select Copy shortened link or Copy full link. You can also copy either link by clicking the Actions dropdown menu and selecting View details. 

Please note: due to recent changes in AdWords ads, if you're using HubSpot tracking URLs in Google AdWords ads, please be sure to use the full link, not the shortened link. Insert the full link into the HubSpot Full Tracking URL into the Final destination field in AdWords ads. The Final destination field must contain the same domain as the landing page URL. For example, if your ad's landing page is http://offers.yoursite.com/demo the Final destination field must contain yoursite.com.

• Paste the URL into your piece of content. 

Analyze your tracking URLs

• In your HubSpot account, navigate to Reports > Analytics Tools.
• Click Traffic analytics. 
• Click the UTM Parameters tab.
• At the top of the page, use the dropdown menus to set the date range and frequency for the chart and table below. 
• Above the chart, click the UTM parameter dropdown menu to see your tracking URLs broken down by campaign, source, medium, content, or term.

• In the top left corner of the chart, click the dropdown menu and select the metric you want to view in the chart. You can select Sessions, New Contacts, Customers, Bounce rate, New visitor sessions, or New session %.  
• If you want to change the chart visualization, click the Style dropdown menu. 

• Below the chart, you'll see a table of your tracking URLs, broken down by the parameter you selected above. Click the individual campaign, source, medium, content, or term to drill down into the data.

• To customize the columns in the table, click Edit columns. In the dialog box, select the checkbox next to a metric to add it to the table or click the x to the right of a metric in the Selected columns section to remove it.