Any business that wants to be successful needs to know which marketing techniques are effective to their customers, members and target audience. Without this knowledge, it’s impossible to know whether your marketing campaigns are effective or if they are simply wasting your time and money.
Which means that campaign tracking is a fundamental part of digital marketing reporting, and if you’re not doing it, or doing it incorrectly, then you may end up using your budgets for activity that doesn’t give you a return on your investment.
At Filter Digital, we spend a lot of time working with marketing teams and educating them on the correct way to setup campaigns so that they can track spend, conversion and return.
We help them to understand by tracking a campaign, you can "follow the bright spots", learn, monitor and ensure it is making the right impact. Likewise, when a particular campaign doesn’t perform as you expect, you can take action, improve the campaign, stop, or focus on a new one, saving yourself valuable time and resource.
For many clients, especially the large proportion that use Google Analytics, the starting advice is the same – work on your campaign tracking tags. Even now it is surprising how teams fail to implement the basics correctly; and when they need to present their numbers back, they cannot produce consistent results and reasoning to back up their reports.
We decided to develop a guide to campaign tracking that we could share with both clients and non-clients alike, showing how to setup your Google Analytics UTM tags correctly, and how to ensure you’re following best practice.
UTM parameters is the tracking standard used by Google Analytics. By adding UTM parameters to the URL in links, it overrides GA's own efforts and gives you the data about where the visits are coming from. By adding parameters to each campaign, you can collect information about the overall efficiency.
This allows you to track campaign by campaign source, name, marketing medium, term and campaign content. Adding UTM parameters is relatively easy, though ensuring you are consistent is more difficult.
You can find the guide here (pdf, no email required). It’s free, and it’s also concise, meaning that you can dip in and quickly refer to it as and when you need to, without needing to delve through tons of technical documentation.
If you are looking to improve engagement online and want to use analytics to help inform your direction, then we think our guide will be useful. We also encourage you to share it, and the link to get to it, with colleagues or anyone that you think may benefit.
In the meantime, here are our top five recommendations if you want to ensure your marketing campaigns are tagged and tracked correctly:
- Be clear on what campaigns will be tracked and monitored
- Decide on terms for Source, Medium, Campaigns
- When posting a new campaign with a link, create a tracking URL
- Review the impact of the campaign within Google Analytics
- Adjust any dashboard displays accordingly to ensure you view the most relevant insight
If you have any feedback on our guide, we’d love to hear from you – especially if you found it helpful and/or experienced positive impacts on your own campaign reporting and conversions. You can reach out to us here.
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