Track QR codes with Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

if your company is running some printed ads Billboards or maybe even tv ads with QR codes you probably want to know if people are engaging with them in this video I will show you how to track QR codes with Google analytics 4 and how to see that data in reports it is very important to understand that QR codes can be tracked with Google analytics only if you prepare particular links before you generate the QR code if QR code is already printed on magazine on some billboard and that QR code just redirects the visitors to the home page and there are no special parameters in the URL you cannot track such QR codes you need to accept the fact that if the QR code is already printed and it was not prepared for tracking then you just cannot measure how people are using that code but if you are planning ahead and you intend to launch a new campaign and QR codes still are not printed or not used anywhere in your marketing then this video will show you how to do that so first of all let's say that I am planning to run a campaign on some magazine and that ad will add a QR code and once the reader scans the code he or she will be redirect to this page which is the goal of my campaign for example so just copy pasting this address right here and using it and the QR code is not enough we need to decorate it with special parameters called UTM parameters so I will copy the URL and then I will post a link below the video to a campaign URL Builder where you can decorate your campaign links with additional parameters that Google analytics recognizes so once you go to this campaign URL builder enter the URL of the website or of the page which is the landing page of your marketing campaign and then you should fill in these fields at least fill in campaign Source medium and name and this is exactly what I will do right now so I always start with the campaign medium because it's the broadest way of how can you categorize your traffic source and it can be things like organic email but in this case since I am working with the magazine mean I mean I will be placing that QR code on a magazine so this is printed media so I can call the medium print then the next parameter that I fill in is campaign Source this is a bit more specific compared to the campaign medium so when to narrow down and usually when it comes to magazines campaign Source could be the name of the magazine let's say that the name of the magazine is cool reading or whatever and then the final parameter that you should enter at least I mean the minimum should be these three but also you can enter campaign term and campaign content but Source medium and campaign are the bare minimum and then campaign name should be the name of what kind of campaign are you running is that QR code related to Black Friday Cyber Monday maybe Christmas sale maybe some rebranding campaign so basically you should enter here the name of your campaign so that you would understand later watching at your data what was the campaign that drove the visitor to your website let's say that this is for Cyber Monday and Black Friday and usually they are called like that and then you can enter also the year of the sale but I will keep it like that and then once you fill in these fields you will get a URL that looks like this if the visitor lands on your website and these parameters will be in the URL like UTM Source UTM medium then you will be able to see that in your ga4 reports that visitors are coming particularly from that campaign and since the medium is print you will know that this is QR code but again if you want you can enter QR if you prefer that so this is also perfectly fine but I will keep it print by the way if you already find this video useful then subscribe and stay up to date with videos like this one now I will copy the URL and the next next step is to generate the QR code you can go to Google Search and just enter QR code generator and select one of the first results to land on a page that might look something like this so here's the thing the longer the URL the more dots it will have in the QR code so for example if I enter just the URL without any parameters you will see that those blocks are still pretty well visible but if I copy a longer URL and include it right here it suddenly gets way more details and if your url is even longer because you have UTM term UTM content or you know some other parameters like that it gets ridiculously detailed and this makes the experience for the user more complicated because you know maybe you will have so many dots here that a camera will not be able to properly scan especially if the QR code is very small and placed somewhere at the corner of the page so instead of placing the full URL right here I would suggest that you use some URL shortener so you can go to Google Search enter a URL shortener and then select some tool from here for example I will be choosing the first one so I'll just click here I can paste the code and click shorten URL so this is the short URL right here that I can use in the QR code generator of course I'm not endorsing that you should use specifically this tool because I'm not even sure I think probably I will not be able to edit this URL later in the future so maybe you should keep looking for some other Alternatives but basically my idea here is that you should use some URL shortener because if you open this URL in a new tab you will see that it redirects to the website and those UTM parameters are present and also if you paste this short URL right here the blocks and dots and this QR code will be much more readable and it will be more convenient for the camera of a smartphone to scan the QR code so once you have the short URL and you have the QR code then you can download it and forward it to the person who's responsible for the printed ad in the magazine so this is half of the job the next part is to test if this is working properly in Google analytics so let's say that I scan this QR code and I as a visitor land on this particular page right here and we have UTM Source UTM medium print and BTM campaign and so on to properly test this I recommend that you go to the description of this video and download a Google analytics debugger Chrome extension so click that link click install and then that extension will appear among other extensions that you have and it will be displayed like this so if you see just a an icon that looks like this click the extension it will refresh the page and now it says that it is on so once this happens then you can refresh the page maybe several times and then you can go to your Google analytics for property open Google analytics find your G for property right here and then click configure and debug view here you should see the data coming from your device but there's a chance that you will see more devices here so if that happens you will need to click one by one in order to identify your own device and then once you do that you should click on the page view event and then here you will see the campaign parameter medium and Source you can expand campaign here is the campaign name then medium and then source so once the magazine is printed and your QR code becomes available to the readers within 48 hours you should start seeing the data coming from that QR code and reports acquisition traffic acquisition or user acquisition but in this case we are focusing on traffic acquisition this is my test property so I don't have much data here and I have just several Channel groupings so here's the thing that you need to keep in mind since we were using print as a campaign medium it is not automatically recognized by Google analytics meaning that it does not know to which channel grouping it should assign therefore all your traffic from QR code will be included and unassigned but don't worry even if you named the medium such as QR code or QR or something else it will still be included as unassigned but this is not a big problem because if you want to check the data coming from your QR code you should click here and switch to session source and medium and then you should see that one of the rows is related to your QR code for example in my case that would be a medium would be print and Source would be cool reading because that's the name of the magazine if you don't see your QR code campaign right here even though you definitely know that at least someone has visited maybe you and your co-workers have used that QR code there are several reasons why this is happening the first reason is that you should check if the final URL of the landing page still contains the UTM parameters because they are necessary if they are gone then your QR code tracking will not work another possible reason is that maybe you did not wait long enough you will need to wait for up to 48 hours to start seeing some data so make sure that after 48 hours have passed then you select the correct date range right here and the third possible reason that comes to my mind is the reporting identity so if in this report you see not a green check mark but you see an orange exclamation mark work and once you click this it says something about thresholds in the reports then you should go to admin of your Google analytics 4 property then click reporting identity then click show all click device based click save and click confirm then you should go to your report refresh it and actually help you start seeing that campaign data if the numbers of website visitors of that campaign are not very high so then you should go to traffic acquisition again change the dimension to Source medium and then you should see your campaign here if you are actively using QR codes and you are running different campaigns then you can click this plus icon right here and look for session campaign if you're using session Source medium and then you will see the name of the campaign right here as well and finally you can zoom out this a bit and then move to the right side and you can see how many conversions did you get from each traffic Source including your QR codes if you want you can even narrow down to particular events right here but again since this is a demo property of mine I don't have any conversions tracked recently so here are zeros and that is how you can track QR codes with Google analytics 4. remember you need to prepare links with UTM parameters before QR code is generated if you found this video useful hit the Thumbs Up Button below the video that will help me understand what videos do you like and what should I create in the future also if you want to learn more about Google tag manager or Google analytics 4 then consider subscribing to this channel my name is Julius this is analytics Mania and I'll see you in the next video [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Analytics Mania - Google Analytics & Tag Manager

Views: 31,940

Keywords: google analytics 4, google analytics 4 tutorial, ga4 campaign tracking, google analytics 4 conversions, google analytics 4 conversion tracking, google analytics 4 setup, google analytics, campaign tracking ga4 - utm tracking in google analytics, ga4 conversion tracking gtm, utm parameters, google analytics qr code, qr code tracking, google analytics utm parameters, google analytics 4 utm

Id: C_fwvw9BXsE

Length: 12min 21sec (741 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2022