Campaign tracking or tagging is a vital factor for every e-commerce and online business. You need to know exactly which campaigns affect traffic and conversions. Otherwise, there is no way you can succeed! Google Analytics will be used as an example to understand this process. Many of the concepts here can also be applied to other Web Analytics tools.
This article explains the background of campaign tracking and provides you with a solid foundation to set it up correctly.
If you’re relatively new to campaign tracking, make sure to read every word carefully.
What is Campaign Tracking?
There is no right or wrong definition, but it can be described as: “An endless process of configuring, measuring, analyzing, and optimizing your online marketing campaigns and online traffic sources and results.”
Let’s take a closer look at the highlighted words:
- Endless process: what you did right today is worthless if you do wrong tomorrow
- Configuration and metering: all your traffic is placed in the right areas using custom parameters
- Analyze and optimize: target and optimize the specific recommendations of a subset of your website visitors
- Traffic sources and results: direct the online marketing you spend to the best performing channels.
As you know, my definition of “Campaign Tracking” is related to the “Web Analytics definition” on Wikipedia:
“Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of internet data for the purpose of understanding and optimizing web usage.”
I admit, this definition is too theoretical. So, let’s put things into practice.
To truly optimize your campaigns, make sure you have accurately set up your goals in Google Analytics.
Default Traffic Sources
By default, Google Analytics can measure three or four different traffic sources:
AdWords traffic in a blur. For this to work, you need to correctly link your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account.
5 (Five) Variables
Google Analytics has five parameters that can be used to tag a specific campaign and create a campaign tracking URL:
- Medium: use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email, affiliate, tbm (cost per click) (mandatory)
- Source: use utm_source to identify a source like google, zanox, pinterest(mandatory)
- Campaign: use utm_campaign to define a campaign name such as summer campaign(mandatory)
- Concept: use utm_term to identify keywords that drive traffic
- Content: use utm_content to distinguish between ads or links pointing to the same URL
In my opinion, and in line with Google AdWords, the campaign tracking hierarchy pyramid looks something like this:
Allow me to explain this with CPC advertising:
- Tool: CPC is the highest level and refers to cost-per-click advertising.
- Source: This could be Google, Bing or another ad network based on CPC.
- Campaign: AdWords related, on-brand, off-brand, contextual, specific product, misspelling, etc. you can have a campaign.
- Term: Each campaign consists of different keywords related to that campaign.
- Context: If you are running an AdWords campaign, you may want to test two or more ad versions for CTR and CR optimization.
Keep this pyramid in mind when naming your campaigns.
This will give you a strong foundation for campaign tagging and optimization.
Campaign Tracking URL
By now, you have a basic understanding of how to name your campaigns; let’s move on to the URLs.
For example, I ran a paid campaign on the Bing network and used three variables:
- Vehicle = tbm
- Source = bing
- Campaign = campaign monitoring
For this specific campaign, the campaign tracking URL would look like this:
https://omniticaret.com/campaign-tracking/?utm_source=bing=cpc=campaign+tracking
As you can see, the first query parameter follows a question mark (?), and the others follow an ampersand ().
I can almost hear you thinking, “Do I have to manually configure all these URLs?”
Of course not, but you can still do it if you want to!
Here are a few options:
- Google URL Builder (if you only need to tag a few URLs)
- Create your own (Excel) table
- Search online for a campaign labeling table
My friends at LunaMetrics recently published a campaign tracking table that might be useful. Download for free!
Test Your Links
As with most areas of online marketing, it’s important to test your links.
As a first step, always test whether your company or client’s website accepts the query parameters. If not, make sure a developer takes care of it.
Here are a few ways to test your campaign URLs:
- Click on a redirect link that leads to your website and check the utmcc parameter to see if the campaign parameters are preserved (use GIF Request Parameters or GA Debugging tactics for this)
- Click on a link that redirects to your website and check Google Analytics in real time (a great option for the less tech-savvy)
Last but not least, I will outline the top eight best practices to get the most out of campaign tracking.
Best Practices
I recommend carefully reading this paragraph and applying these tips to your specific situation.
- Schedule an internal meeting: The bigger the company, the more people it probably involves. It is important that everyone has at least a basic understanding of campaign labeling.
- Use naming conventions: Things start to go wrong if one person uses email and a different email for a variable environment, configure it correctly from the beginning.
- Use the right tools: build your links using a spreadsheet or Google URL Builder
- Don’t overdo it: If Google AdWords and Google Analytics are connected, you do not need to tag your AdWords URLs
- Use only the campaign variables you need; sometimes it is enough to use tools, resources and campaigns
- Media, less is more; if you have hundreds of different media, it will become very difficult to analyze and optimize to the highest level.
- Make sure you submit personally identifiable information (PII) in a campaign tracking parameter.
- Set Google Analytics filters to aid processing; for this specific purpose, it is recommended to set campaign parameters to lowercase.
We recommend applying the same filter to the other four campaign parameters.
