Campaign Tracking

You only get one chance to do it right. Try not to screw it up.

By Bryan Cristina

Things you should probably do…

Have an actual way to track your visitors (you’d be surprised)

Know the dates the campaign will start and end Know what types of ads/links will be driving

traffic to your site Find out who is responsible for the different

campaign components HAVE GOALS. Be aware of other campaigns or objectives that

may interfere with this one

More things you should probably do…

Be aware of other campaigns or objectives that this campaign may disrupt

Never trust anyone, especially yourself Have a good test plan Verify your live, post launch information Be prepared to make changes quickly

Have a way to track your visitors

Does the site they land on have tracking code? If not, can you even add it?

Are visitors (incorrectly) being sent to a redirect? It will likely delete any tracking parameters

Be sure your analytics package can even handle campaigns.

Be sure your analytics package license is set up for campaigns. With some tools, it’s not standard in some of the basic plans

Know the start and end dates

That slow first day of data? It may not have actually even launched like you thought. If it did, something is definitely wrong.

You can’t effectively do averages if you don’t know how many days the campaign has been running

Know the last possible second you can get things taken care of. People will forget you were excluded from everything until the last minute and will just blame you for being stupid.

Know the types of campaign traffic drivers and who is responsible for them

Banner ads are different from paid search, which are different from links originating on other sites. Each are tracked differently (and should be tracked differently)

Know where to put the tracking codes and in what format – At the end of a link, into the ad tool itself, on the landing page, or possibly not anywhere at all

Different people may be responsible for each of the ad types. Don’t assume the paid search contact will get your tracking codes onto the banner ads.

Have goals

Isn’t that why you’re trying to measure things in the first place?

Be focused. Basic metrics such as visits are useless – campaigns with more money will have more visitors, usually, telling you nothing important

Educate others on what’s good and what’s bad. Many visitors who never convert is worse than less visitors who highly convert. Not everyone thinks that way.

“We want to see what people from this campaign do on the site” is not a goal, it’s an excuse for those who don’t know what they want to measure or for campaigns that have no purpose

Getting stakeholders to help you set goals ultimately helps you deliver a report that has exactly what they’re looking for

Goals help set benchmarks to measure against next time

Be aware of other campaigns and efforts

Campaign tags for most analytics products will overwrite each other. Try to reduce this as much as possible and look out for other campaigns that may overwrite yours

Do not tag on-site promotions with campaign tags unless you absolutely have to. There is probably a better way to find what you were looking for without ruining your off-site campaign data

In your pursuit of tracking everything, do not destroy SEO efforts by doing things like adding parameters to the end of links from sites such as affiliate, contest, or promotion sites

Never trust anyone

Not everyone knows how to track campaigns. More than likely, barely anyone else does – even if they think they do

Follow through and check up, especially when dealing with external ad planners/agencies. It is their goal to deliver impressions and visits, not worry about your tracking tags

“It’s not in test, but it will show up in production” means they have no idea what you’re talking about, don’t care, and none of your tracking tags will ever make it onto your campaigns

You probably screwed something up along the way. Everyone makes mistakes and it’s better to doubt yourself rather than having everyone else do it for you

Test. Verify. Change

Multiple tags and technologies means there’s a good chance something isn’t working right. Running your own tests will find those before it’s too late

New campaigns may mean new configurations, variables, and reports. If you have no way of reprocessing old data (such as Google) be sure everything works before launch

Enlist the help of Quality Assurance testers, if possible. They’re disturbingly meticulous and will find things that soar past your blind spots

Check your results as soon as possible. Finding out things weren’t tracking 2 weeks into a campaign will result in questions that never can have a good answer, even if it’s not your fault

Know what could possibly go wrong and be ready to act immediately. Losing a tiny amount of data is bad, but not nearly as bad as losing a few days or more of it