Who doesn't use Google Analytics to measure their website performance? But creating a Google account and dropping the tracking code at the bottom of your site's source code is where most folks call it a day.
But let's say you have a large banner ad on the left side of your page and you're really not sure whether it's worth nearly 100,000 pixels of space it consumes. Sure, you can take guesses as to it's effectiveness, but why not employ a more accurate method of measuring that banner ads success?
Enter Google's query string parameters, which allow you to assign a source, medium and/or campaign to any link within your site, including, of course, links from banner ads. Let's see a code example:
<a href="/products/?utm_source=sidebar&utm_medium=image&utm_campaign=mysite">
<img src="/img/products-banner-ad.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="600" />
</a>
The above example illustrates the use of a banner ad in the sidebar of a page, to promote the Products page within a site. By adding the utm_ query string parameters as shown above, Google will assign any clicks on that ad to the relative source, medium and campaign in your Analytics account.
To view these statistics within your Analytics account, try visting the Content -> Site Content -> Pages section.
Then, choose a secondary dimension, such as Traffic Sources -> Source.