Campaign Tracking Revisited – Part 2 (Advanced) [Advanced Solutions]

Campaign tracking is one of the most fundamental strategies to increase conversion for your company. Campaign tracking is a huge topic that was covered in the past in this blog post and I will revisit here with some information for the more advanced users out there.

Campaign basics

Campaign Tracking Revisited – Part 1 (basics) covers all the basics of tracking campaigns and reports that will help you increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Campaigns Advanced

Campaign Tracking Strategy

One of the largest problems with campaign tracking that I see at companies is a lack of a strategy and processes. Campaign tracking has become so “basic” that companies are overlooking the accuracy and importance of tracking ALL campaigns throughout the company. Few companies have a strategy that covers all campaigns and there is no plan to update and adapt their campaign tracking strategy. For example, does your company have a strategy and process for measuring Twitter or Facebook campaigns? So, if there is one suggestion I can give every company out there, it is to meet quarterly or biannually and decide how you are going to adapt your campaign tracking strategy. These meetings will help your company organize campaigns across departments and advertising platforms.

Campaign Tracking – Tools / Processes

The accuracy of your campaign tracking is highly dependent on your company’s ability to use and classify campaign codes. The weakest link in any tracking strategy will be the people. Humans are prone to making mistakes and they might mistype a campaign code or classify it incorrectly causing discrepancies in your campaign reporting.

The most successful companies that I have worked with all seem to have a system to manage their campaigns and campaign codes. The simplest system that your company should have is an internal webpage that will generate a campaign code for each campaign created. A much better system is one where users create campaign codes and insert classification data during creation of the campaign code. The system stores the data and then automatically uploads the classification data to Omniture on a regular basis. Not only is this a way to increase accuracy of tracking campaign codes but it will also save you and your analytics/marketing team many hours of manual campaign management. If you are looking for assistance with building such a system the Engineering Services Consulting team can help you with the specifics.

Costs of Goods Sold (COGS)

This is one solution that almost every client who sells goods should be using. If you are not using this then consider investing some time figuring out how you can get this setup for your company. If there is one thing I want you to take away from this post it will be this concept.

If you have a Google ad for a Nintendo Wii and the campaigns report shows that campaign generated $1,000,000 in revenue then it might look like the campaign is doing a great job. However, there are two problems. First, you do not know how much the campaign cost you, so if the campaign cost you $1,500,000 then you are losing a lot of money. Most solutions such as Omniture Search Center can get you the cost per click in your reports, but that is still not a complete picture. The second issue is you don’t know how much of that revenue is actual revenue and how much of it is the cost of the Nintendo Wii. Now imagine that you had the cost of the Nintendo Wii in your reporting so you could subtract that cost from the revenue generated to get net revenue.

That is where COGS comes into play. The report below was built using two metrics added to the campaigns report from the COGS solution.

The “Cost of Goods” metric is a metric that shows how much of the revenue went into the product that was purchased.
The “COGS” metric is simply a calculated metric where we subtract “Cost of Goods” from Revenue to get the Net Revenue.

This new way to look at your reporting will help you to get a complete picture of how your campaigns are performing. See the more in-depth explanation about COGS reporting here. You can also request information about the solution from the ES Solution Portal.

Cross Visit Participation (CVP)

CVP is one of the newest advanced solutions to come out of the Engineering Services team here at Adobe’s Omniture business unit and it is one of my personal favorites. The basic goal of CVP is to recognize that multiple campaigns will affect conversion. For example a user might have an experience like this:

In the above example all the revenue is attributed to email which is fundamentally not fair to the other campaigns. CVP can distribute the revenue or any other metric to the other campaigns for a more complete view of your campaigns reporting. For more in-depth explanation read this blog post. You can also request more information about this solution from the ES Solution Portal.

Keyword Auto-Classification and Misspelling

One of our more popular and time saving solutions is our auto-classification solution. The solution will take keywords and auto-classify them into groups for easier and faster reporting. The solution can be customized in many ways to create almost any type of grouping that you would want.

The biggest benefit is the misspelling addition to the solution. To be honest, this is probably one of the simplest quick wins for companies that I can think of. For almost all companies, if you are paying for branded keywords (keywords that have your brand name or product name) then you know they almost always convert better than non branded keywords. That is where the misspelling add-on comes in handy; we can setup the system to detect misspelled versions of your keywords giving you an advantage to bid on these keywords for less and continue to have a higher conversion rate. All of the clients that I have seen use this strategy have always generated significant ROI. You can get more information about the Keyword Auto-classification Solution here.

Offline Campaign Tracking

With the Super Bowl XLV (45) right around the corner I am often asked how a company can track offline campaigns. The most common way is to create a vanity URL and have it add the campaign code to the URL via a redirect or simply by having a specific landing page for the URL and setting the campaign code on the page. Both of those methods are good but not always feasible especially if you want to promote your existing URL.

An advanced solution we offer uses logic to predict if a user came from an offline advertisement and labels the visit as coming from the offline campaign that you are running at the time. You can find out more about the Offline Campaign tracking solution here.