Google Analytics is hands down one of the most popular free analytics  platforms.  It is used by large sites as well as personal blogs.

There is a ton of information provided in the reports that Google Analytics generates and since the reports are customizable you can slice and dice the information any way you see fit.

Google Analytics helps you identify where visitors are coming from, how long they stay on your site, which products are selling, which keywords lead to the highest conversion rates, which pages are most popular, and so on. I will have plenty of posts in the future discussing Google Analytics (including some advanced tweaks), but in this post I’d like to discuss the  ”Traffic Sources” sources portion in Google Analytics. In particular, how to include information into your URLs to help you and Google Analytics identify a source of traffic.

A good example of why Google Analytics needs your help with identifying a source of traffic is when a newsletter has been sent out. Let’s assume that in your newsletter is a link back to your homepage.

When a reader clicks this link, Google Analytics usually will just count the visit as a referral and your visitor’s email service as the referrer.  This visit will be displayed in Google Analytics with something like this: webmail.aol.com / referral.

But what if you send out a number of newsletters a month? Shouldn’t you be able to tell the different between visits coming from one email vs another? Without this type of info, it would be hard to optimize your email campaigns.

This is where Google’s URL Builder tool comes into play. This tool will help you generate URLs that you can include in newsletters, press releases or anywhere you would like to pass more information regarding the visitor’s source.

The tool is pretty straightforward. You can find it here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 or you can Google “url builder”.

If you wanted to send traffic from your newsletter, press release, etc to your homepage you would enter your website address into the field labeled “Website URL”. Next, enter a “campaign source” (newsletter, or bing, etc), “campaign medium” (email, or cpc, etc),  ”campaign name” (winter2009, etc) and click “Generate URL”. Now you can use your new custom URL in your campaigns and the info will be associated with the visit.

You will now be able to find visit information in Google Analytics under Traffic Sources –> Campaigns.

This is a great way to tag cpc campaigns for Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, and others.

Note: Assuming you have Adwords auto-tagging enabled and your Analytics account properly linked, data from Google Adwords is automatically included in your Analytics reports.