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Can we use Google Analytics custom campaigns with Docebo?

  • 21 October 2021
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M
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We recently started adding links to courses to our company Community newsletter emails (sent by our Marketing team via Constant Contact). I’d like to start tracking newsletter clicks (e.g., if a user clicks a link in the email newsletter they received) in Google Analytics via custom campaigns. 

I just ran some quick tests this morning but since Google Analytics campaign reporting is not updated until the following day I won’t know if it worked until tomorrow. But when first going to the LMS sign in page it redirects/swaps the URL out along with my campaign tags : ( 

Anyone using custom campaigns in Google analytics with Docebo?

I saw a similar discussion here but it’s not Google Analytics specific: https://community.docebo.com/topic/show?tid=213&fid=3

I guess worst case we could setup that workaround but I’d rather not. Alternatively I suppose I could just ask our Marketing person to do this same thing in Constant Contact. But I’d rather control the entire setup of campaign tags and access the reporting myself since we already have Google Analytics added to Docebo.

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Best answer by alekwo 21 October 2021, 19:36

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alekwo
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Hi @mark 

yes, it’s possible and it’s working to an extent.

in our email notifications, we’re simply adding the utm tagging after the shorcodes - e.g.

[course_saml_link]&utm_source=notification&utm_medium=email&utm_content=course_link&utm_campaign=courseReminderDigest

We’re also adding UTM tags to all links that are pointing to Docebo from other systems (our help center, product UI, community posts, etc.), and we see the campaign, source, medium data in Google Analytics.  So we know exactly from where people are coming to our learning platform and which activities are most useful to generate more traffic.

Still, we observe about half (47%) of traffic being direct loads (or loads without any tags), which I suspect is way too much, and may be related to those redirects.

So, I don’t treat it as a very accurate information, but rather an indicator of general trends.

 

-- Alek Oleszkiewicz - linkedin.com/in/aleko
pmo
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@alekwo Have you tried using this within the platform for custom content boxes by chance? It used to be the case that the LMS would strip that from the URL after the user clicked it so I’m curious if you’ve had luck for applying those campaigns via custom content box. 

alekwo
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@pmo I'm not exactly sure what you’d like to achieve by using utm tags within the platform. 

The purpose of UTM tags is to track sources of incoming traffic, as far as I know they have no purpose for being used once someone is navigating between pages. Even worse, if you add the utm_source tag along the way, for Google it will mean it's a new session, so your reports will get skewed.

-- Alek Oleszkiewicz - linkedin.com/in/aleko
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Circling back on this. I did go ahead and setup a custom campaign and added utm tags to the links we sent out to users via an email newsletter campaign. 

In my initial testing I noticed that when I clicked on the tagged url’s myself, I would be asked to authenticate by Docebo (makes sense) and once authenticated it would redirect and strip out the Google Analytics tags, rendering them useless.

I then clicked one again, having an active/authenticated session, figuring that would at least get captured by GA. 

Sure enough, a month later I checked GA and it reported that our newsletter campaign resulted in a single user accessing the LMS as a result of the newsletter campaign, which I will assume was me. Fortunately, we know that’s false because our email marketing tool captures the clicks/analytics via their service and provides the data. Would have been nice to have it tracked via GA though.

I don’t see how this could work to track anything if Docebo strips out the utm tags upon authentication and redirect, unless all users are coming from another web property that has some type of federated/SSO type shared authentication and Docebo doesn’t strip the tags on redirect in those cases?

martiniwinski
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My colleague came up with a genius solution to this issue of SSO stripping out campaign URL’s in Docebo.

Next time you want to try and track link clicks in a newsletter, homepage, or from a document, try this below.

Take ANY Docebo LMS url and simply add a hashtag at the end of it, followed by an ID you can make up.

For example:

https://test.lms.com/learn/course/748/session/61/leader2leader-panel-discussion

Becomes:
https://test.lms.com/learn/course/748/session/61/leader2leader-panel-discussion#campaign-title

 

The # at the end can be added to any Docebo LMS url without messing up the link. It’ll still take you where you want to go, but Google Analytics tracks this custom # and you can report on it! 

 

Martin Iwinski
pmo
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@mark The above comment is what I was suggesting as a UTM work around in this thread

 

 

 

martiniwinski
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@pmo Thank you sir. I didn’t see this thread earlier. You explained it nicely!

Martin Iwinski
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I must be doing something wrong. My test scenario:

  1. Sign out of LMS.
  2. Paste and browse to following shareable course link, with #test added to end to see if it will pass through once authenticated via SSO: https://university.mycompany.com/learn/course/12705/introduction-to-vertex-certificate-center?generated_by=13036&hash=ef43a859bb808cc53483c3bf331a25fcf65d2384#test
  3. Authenticate via SSO.
  4. Get redirected, as expected, to the above URL but with the “#test” stripped out.

Subsequent tests now display the red “Error while processing the requested operation” box. 

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