Tackling the basics of web analytics: Campaign tracking

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.

In my last column I outlined how organisations can come unstuck with their web analytics if they don’t pay sufficient attention in general to the integrity of the data they are reporting. It can seriously impact on the decisions that the organisation is making. One of the areas in particular that I have seen organisations struggle with using their web analytics tools is campaign tracking and once again it’s often the processes and not the technologies that are the root cause of the problem.

The ability to track marketing campaigns is now a standard component of any web analytics tool. We don’t need to worry anymore about having to set up specific landing pages and tracking referrals to the page. Most web analytics tools now use the same principle of campaign tracking. This involves of adding a tracking parameter to the end of the landing page URL to identify the piece of marketing activity. The web analytics tool is then configured to recognise the tracking parameter at the end of the landing page URL as a visit generated by a campaign and then populate the database and reports as appropriate. Simple enough in theory but often trickier in practice.

Some of the common pitfalls that lead to poor quality campaign tracking data are:

• Campaign data is not properly structured
• Campaigns are not consistently tagged
• Campaigns are not consistently tagged consistently

The first of these pitfalls is a planning issue. The second two are process issues.

Most web analytics tools have a framework or structure for campaign reporting. This is where a specific piece of activity is identified by a series of attributes. These attributes are then used to provide different levels of reporting. If we take Google Analytics purely as an example, then a piece of activity can be described using up to five different attributes (Source, Medium, Term, Content and Name). Part of the campaign tracking implementation process is to determine what these attributes mean for your own campaigns and how detailed you want to be. It’s important to think ahead about what activity you might want to run in the future as well and how that might fit into the framework. For example, you might be running only one type of email newsletter at the moment but if you develop your email marketing strategy to include different types of more targeted emails, will your campaign tracking approach allow you to identify how each of the different types of emails are working?

Whilst the underlying principle of campaign tracking is generally the same across most web analytics tools, the framework for reporting does differ from system to system. Some tools are more flexible in their approach than others. Whatever the tool though, proper planning is required to ensure that the right kind of reports come out the other end.

After planning comes process. Having decided how you want to structure and report on your campaigns, the campaign landing page URLs need to have tracking parameters attached to them. Sometimes this is an automated process but more often than not there is a degree of manual intervention and that’s where the problems usually start.

First of all, all campaigns need to be tagged to be tracked. This might seem like a statement of the obvious but it is surprising how often in the heat of the moment to get a campaign live, the tracking parameters are forgotten. I know that this doesn’t happen in your organisation but it does in others? Once the campaign has gone live without the correct tracking parameters attached you can’t go back and recover the data. It just doesn’t exist. And the time that you really want to know how a campaign is performing is when it goes live. So, you need to have management processes in place to ensure that all campaign landing page URLs have tracking parameters.

You also need to ensure that the landing page parameters have the right tracking parameters in place as well. For example, if you have an attribute which is “email” to identify all visits coming from emails, then it needs to be used consistently as “email” as opposed to “Email” or “e-mail” or “E-mail”. Lack of consistency in tagging resulting is poor data integrity in reporting. Again, this may seem obvious but the challenge comes when you may have different people or agencies responsible for management different types of campaign. They all need to tag the campaigns in the same way and a degree of process and control is required. This can be helped by having a centralised approach or using campaign management technologies.

So, planning and process are the watchwords for campaign tracking success.