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Campaigns are defined only by tags on inbound links and not through any campaign “setup” per se.
You may hear references to “setting up” a campaign in Google Analytics, but no campaign setup per se is required, since a campaign is defined only by the campaign parameters, or “tags”, that you append to your inbound URLs.
In some instances, such as the AdWords Autotagging option and the automatic tagging that certain emailing platforms provide, you do not have to tag your links manually. In all cases, however, it is only the campaign tags, and not any setup within Google Analytics itself, that define the campaigns.
This means that you could configure campaign links that point to any website. This could be potentially useful if you’re sending campaign traffic to a partner site, even if you’re limited to read-only access (or have no direct access) to Google Analytics for the site.
Of course, campaign tracking won’t work correctly on your site or any other if the tags are not formatted correctly, so make sure to use the Google Analytics URL Builder whenever you’re “setting up” a campaign.
