Untangling the Gordian Knot of campaign tracking – Part 3

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

In this series I have been taking a look at some of the issues and challenges in tracking the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. More and more advertisers are looking to improve the way that they track their campaigns so that they can make smarter decisions about the way they spend their money.

One of the challenges is that quite often they are using multiple systems to manage and track their campaigns. Advertisers or their agencies will be using adservers, bid management tools, email systems and so on. In addition, they may be tracking their campaigns using their web analytics system. One of the common issues raised is that the data from the campaign management tools is often different to the data from the web analytics systems and so one of them “must be wrong”. The thing to realise is that the different systems are generally measuring different things and so the numbers are quite likely to be different. So it’s important to be clear about what is being measured and how it’s being measured.

So first of all, what’s being measured where? In general terms, campaign management systems such as ad-servers and bid management systems are measuring impressions and clicks, ie how many times the ad was served and how many times it was clicked on. Web analytics systems measure visits, ie the arrival of a visitor on a website. One of the biggest areas of discrepancy is between the number of clicks recorded and the number of visits observed from a particular campaign or channel. There might be a number of reasons for this.

First of all, clicks and visits are not the same thing. Someone clicking on an ad is not the same thing as someone being recorded as landing on a website. There are three main possibilities why this might be so.

1. The person doesn’t actually get to the website
2. The person gets to the website but moves on before the visit is recorded
3. The person gets to the website but is not recognised as coming from the campaign

In the first instance someone clicking on an ad may never reach the website. This might be for a number of reasons but can occur if the website doesn’t load quickly enough. They click the ad, wait and then go back to the search results page, for example, and click on another ad.

In the second instance the visitor might land on the landing page but move on further into the site or off the site before the landing page visit is recorded. Most web analytic systems used for campaign tracking will be using a page tag to capture the data. If the visitor lands on the landing page and then either clicks through to another page or exits the site before the tag is loaded, then visit won’t be recorded against that campaign. Quite often the tag is placed towards the bottom of the page and so if the page loads slowly or the visitor doesn’t wait for the page to be loaded, then it’s possible that the tag won’t load.

In the third instance, the visitor gets to the website, the visit is recorded, but it’s not attributed to the particular campaign. One of most common methods of tracking campaigns using a web analytics system is by attaching a campaign tracking parameter to the URL of the landing page. It might look something like this: “www.mysite.com/landingpage.html?source=google”. In this case the “source=google” bit identifies that visitor as having originated from a Google Adwords campaign. All the main web analytics systems can be configured to recognise and report on campaigns in this way. The configuration varies from system to system but the principle is the same, and if the tracking parameter is missing then the visit won’t be recognised as coming from a particular campaign.

Creating the camping tracking parameters and attaching them to the landing page URLs is often a manual or semi-automated process. This means there is always the potential for error. Advertisers need to develop and implement appropriate business processes to ensure that the right campaign tracking parameters are attached to the landing page URLs for all their ads. This can be quite a challenge, particularly if have you have a number of different agencies managing different aspects of your campaigns. But with campaign tracking it really is a case of garbage in, garbage out. If the campaign tracking parameters are not correct, you won’t get good data in your reports.

Another thing to look out for is the impact of using redirects. Some campaign management systems might intercept and redirect the visitor between the ad and the site. They do this so that they can record the ad being clicked in their own system. What advertises need to be careful about it whether the redirect has any effect on the campaign tracking parameter and that the parameter remains attached during the redirect process. It’s another thing that needs testing and checking.

A big difference between campaign management systems and web analytic systems is that web analytic systems only track click-throughs and the subsequent behaviour. Campaign management systems can also measure impression levels and, in the case of ad-serving technologies, can also track subsequent conversion events. I discussed the issue of measuring post-impression or view-through effects in the last column but it can be a major source of discrepancy between what a campaign management system is reporting and what the web analytics system is reporting. Particularly as the conversion might be attributed to one channel in one system and to another channel in another system. This whole area of what is called “attribution management” is something that I will look at next time.

Till then…