Today, our Express CMS & ENGAGE Suite Product Manager, Meghan Murray, answers another common question that we hear from clients looking for ways to boost online engagement.
How can I determine how much traffic I’m driving to a sponsor’s site through a contest?
Meghan: Great question! There are lots of free tools online that you can use to build a trackable link, such as Google’s Campaign URL Builder or Bit.ly. An advantage to using the URL builder available from Google is that you can create multiple links for the same campaign and easily track where your traffic for that campaign is coming from through Google Analytics. For example, if you’re promoting your sponsor through a dedicated page on your website, an e-blast, and a contest, each piece of the campaign should have its own unique tracking link. When creating the link in the Campaign URL Builder that will live in your contest, you can customize the parameters for that link to include details such as the source (contest, newsletter, blog post), the medium (website, email, banner ad, etc.), and the name of your sponsor’s campaign (not to be confused with the contest name itself). The custom link generated by the URL builder can be placed directly into your contest. The results of clicks, page views, and more will be available in the Report section of your Google Analytics dashboard, along with the results of your other custom links for that campaign.
For full instructions on how to build your custom link, check out this support article from Google.
Now that you have your custom trackable link, let’s review a best practice for placing it within a sweepstakes or UGC contest within the Engage Suite Contesting platform. Rather than dropping the full URL into your contest text, use the hyperlink option in your design editor to attach the custom link to your sponsor’s name or a call to action phrase.
For more ways to improve your online sweepstakes and promotions, check out this contest checklist.
