Tracking the Effectivness of Marketing Campaigns
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Search Engine Marketing on March 28th, 2007
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I have written previously about the tracking of email campaigns. Tracking any other marketing campaign works on exactly the same principle.
This post aims to show you how to effectively track your marketing campaigns and more importantly, show you what is possible with this information.
As with all information analysis you need to define up-front why you want information, what its purpose is, what you will do with the information and what information you require. Once you have written down these things, you can then begin to plan your marketing campaign tracking implementation.
Lets take an example of a television advertising campaign which is designed to drive traffic to your website. TV adverts don’t come cheap so you will want to know if web traffic increased as a result of your advert, did the traffic convert into sales and is it worth running TV ad campaigns in the future?
To gain answers to these questions you will need o identify the web traffic as being generated as a direct result of the TV advert. Once the traffic has been identified it can then be tracked through your web analytics tool to find out if it converted into sales which will answer whether the TV campaign is worth repeating. You could also glean the return on investment (ROI) of the ad campaign by then taking those web conversions and seeing how much revenue they generated in comparison to the cost of the ad campaign.
Here comes the tracking
Every ad campaign will normally contain at least 2 elements. The first is a marketing message that you wish to convey, something like “My product is the greatest!”.
The second element is a call to action which specifies the viewer to carry out an activity, something like “Go to my website at www.webanalyticmatt.com and buy my stuff!”.
It is this call to action that we are going to focus on. We need to make this call to action unique to all other website traffic and other marketing campaigns. To do this we use a number of name = value pairs in the query string of the URL of your site. A query string is everything after the ? in a URL.
An example tracking URL might be www.webanalyticmatt.com?campaign=salesgeneration&channel=tv
&segment=sky1&advert=3&dateofad=22-march-2007
Now, the first thing I think when I see that URL is “No way is anyone going to type all that in to their web browser!”. Luckily we can do some HTML redirection magic to turn that complicated URL into www.webanalyticmatt.com/free. (Heres a PHP script to get you started.) So on the call to action you just need to tell people to visit the shorter, vanity URL which will automatically redirect into your tracking URL thus making your ad campaign traffic trackable.
Breaking down the tracking code
In the above example I used the following codes in the trackable URL:-
- Campaign
- Channel
- Segment
- Advert
- Date of Ad
These codes should be used across all of your marketing campaigns so that they can be compared on a like by like basis. Consistency is key.
Campaign defines the overall marketing objective for that marketing campaign.
Channel defines the distribution channel for that marketing objective to be realised.
Segment defines the individual marketing message or audience for that message.
Advert is the individual advert shown which has driven the traffic to the website.
Dateofad defines the data on which the advert was released, as the same advert may be released a number of times to difference audiences and on different dates.
Using the above tracking codes and the right web analytics tool you can have the tracking granularity to ask most business questions about the traffic your marketing campaign drives to your website.
These tracking codes are specific to adverts but hopefully you can see how they could be generalised and then used for any marketing campaign that had a web element. Example campaigns include TV ads, pay-per-click advertising, link building, affiliate schemes, banner advertising, email campaigns and offline print adverts.
If you come up with a truely generic set of tracking codes the please share it with your fellow marketers by posting a comment below.
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