Untangling the Gordian Knot of campaign tracking – Part 1

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

One of the challenges that any business that does any level of online marketing these days is the proliferation in systems and data that they will be using. Typically an organisation or their agencies will be using ad-serving systems, bid management systems, affiliate management systems, email marketing systems and so on.

Each of these marketing systems will have reporting capabilities built in, with the data being fed by a tag on the key pages on the site. Often if a conversion event happens within a certain period (say 30 days) after someone has clicked through from an ad, an affiliate link, an email link or whatever the system Additionally they will be using a web analytics system to track campaigns too, usually by using tags across the site. As well as all of that they may be looking at customer acquisition data in their customer databases.

Today’s online marketers are not short of numbers. The trouble is when you have two watches, you’re never sure of the right time. The situation raises a number of issues such as:

• How do I mange all the different tags that I have on the key pages on my site?
• If I have all these different sources reporting conversions up to 30 days later how do I know which channel is really responsible for the conversion?
• How do I best attribute conversion effects to the effect of different types of online marketing working together?
• How do I reconcile all these different data sources?

These are not easy questions to answer but at least the technologies are moving in the right direction. Take for example the development of what are known as “universal tags”. The idea of these universal tags is that they alleviate the need to have separate tags on your key pages for each tracking system that you use. In theory the universal tag sends the right system the right information at the right time. This technology is still in its nearly days and a number of different providers of tracking technologies are competing in this space.

A more common concern amongst organisations I work with is about how sales or other conversion events are attributed to different marketing channels. The scenario is this: a visitor clicks through to the site from an affiliate link one day but doesn’t convert. The next day the same visitor does a search and clicks through to the site and converts from a sponsored link. Both the affiliate tracking system and the bid management system will be configured to count sales up to 30 days later and so in this case both will “claim” the sale.

The trouble is that the online marketer doesn’t know which channel is really driving the conversions and the sale will be counted twice. Even worse it may be paid for twice if the channels are operating on a CPA (Cost per Acquisition) type of deal. The key thing here is to get to a point where a single tracking system is responsible for attributing conversion events to campaigns based on some criteria.

The use of the universal tags discussed earlier can help this situation but also many organisations use their web analytics systems to provide that single point of reference. The web analytic tools can be configured to recognise visitors that arrive from different campaigns and in the event of a conversion, assigning that conversion to a particular marketing channel or campaign.

However, web analytics solutions don’t provide the total answer for a couple, of reasons. First of all they only track “click” events and secondly the way that attribute the conversion to a channel, or campaign is often relatively simplistic. Depending on the goals on a campaign and the process by which awareness is built and converted into a conversion event, the view of campaigns that you get from a web analytics tool may not be providing the right perspective on which decisions about marketing optimisation can be made.

Next time I’ll take a look at some of these issues in more detail. Till then…