You’ve got a ton of marketing tactics cooking – paid search, display, affiliates, email, social – probably others. Depending on the size of your organization, you may mange them all, or just one. I don’t look for religion very often, but I do in my campaign tagging structure. Call it standardization, call it consistency, call it a well defined taxonomy. Whatever you want to call it, make it simple, easy to understand and for the love of god, document it somewhere.
Recall our discussion around URL parameters? Campaign tagging is the way to add information on your destination URL to help your web analytics platform, and ultimately you, define, track, and categorize the traffic you’re driving to your site.
In part 1, we’ll just talk about the different things you might want to consider tracking. I prefer to think about this from general to specific, so that’s order in which we’ll review things.
| Medium | Think of this as a marketing channel. Examples include paid search, display, or email. |
| Source | This is a specific vendor or marketing partner. Things like Google, Quantcast, or Responsys. |
| Paid/Unpaid | Note whether the tactic is paid or unpaid. |
| Segment | Businesses can be complex. If you’re marketing to multiple segments of a market, this can be helpful. |
| Country | If you operate in multiple countries, defining the intended country the marketing tactic is supporting will be useful. |
| Campaign | I view this one in one of two flavors: either always-on (something like paid search) or a true campaign that has a start and end date. |
| Tactic | This will vary by channel, but it’s the detail behind the medium. For display, tactics might include prospecting, conquesting, or remarketing. For paid search, you might think of this as your main CTA vs sitelinks. |
| Creative | This really gets into a lot of detail but will be extremely useful for measuring creative performance. |
| Size | Similarly, size is super detailed, but again gives you a very deep read on campaign performance. Of course size is not always relevant to the medium. |
These are the key elements that have been useful for me to incorporate into campaign tracking parameters to give me a rolled-up or rolled-down view of performance in my web analytics platform. In part 2 of the Tagging Best Practices series, we’ll go into how to create a fool-proof structure for your campaign tracking parameters.
Are there other elements that you’ve incorporated into your campaign tracking? Don’t keep it to yourself…
Ready to dig in? Check out the campaign tagging template…
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