What is campaign tracking?
Campaign tracking is how companies identify how users find their websites or specific web pages. This technique is commonly used to gauge the success of online advertising campaigns. The effort of tracking campaigns helps marketers understand how well they’re performing and what should be done differently next time.
The strategy uses a series of parameters appended to a link that points to a particular website. These parameters track the behavior of each visitor who clicks the link.
Campaign tracking is one of the only ways to identify whether a campaign is wasting or earning money. Without tracking, marketers cannot differentiate between website visitors and have no insight into which campaigns are performing. Digital marketing services can help track a wide variety of campaigns for a better chance of success.
Types of campaign tracking
There are many campaign tracking tools on the market. Most group tracking methods into the following three categories:
- Tracking URLs: A URL leading to a page on an organization’s site with a tracking code at the end of it. This code provides behavioral information to the analytics software. Tracking URLs are most often used for pay-per-click (PPC), email, and ad campaigns on other sites.
- Tracking pixels: Tiny, transparent images placed over ads in emails or on websites that share information with the analytics software about the ad, email, or page viewed. These pixels are especially beneficial to determining the effectiveness of an ad campaign. They also show marketers the discrepancy between how much the ad has been seen and how often it’s been clicked.
- Cookies: Browser files that store user data like behavior, preferences, and location. Cookies are used to create personalized profiles on specific visitors. These profiles are used to show visitors hyper-relevant, personalized content. This tracking type works well for personalized retargeting. Cookie tracking software can be used to scan websites to identify and list what cookies, beacons, tags, tracking pixels, local objects, and other website tracking technologies are being used.
Benefits of campaign tracking
Campaign tracking helps organizations identify which marketing efforts are working, so appropriate funds can be allocated. Here are a few examples of how campaign tracking contributes to a company’s marketing efforts:
- Know your audience: Campaign tracking makes it easy for companies to learn what type of content and messaging their audience responds to best, where they spend most of their time online, and what keywords they search.
- Optimize campaigns: Understanding which elements bring the most visitors to a company’s site enables marketers to optimize spending for improved campaign management. Doing so means they can allocate advertising dollars toward what works best.
- Personalize your content: Learning what campaigns are most effective means that marketers can personalize campaign content, messaging, offers, channels, and more so that campaigns are tailored to their audience.
- Increase conversions: Optimized campaigns result in more website visitors. Campaign tracking increases conversion rates combined with the added benefit of personalized content.
Basic elements of campaign tracking
Google Analytics uses five basic parameters to create campaign-tracked URLs. Each parameter provides a glimpse into how the user reached the website. The parameters are:
- Source: The website the user clicked from, aka the referral source. It shows the exact traffic source, including the domain name or social platform.
- Medium: The type of link the user clicked that led them to the site. This shows whether the link was PPC, social, email, or organic.
- Term: The keyword the user searched for that led them to the website.
- Content: The content of the ad that was clicked on. This shows which version of an ad is performing better.
- Campaign: The name of the campaign the click belongs to that lured the visitor to the website.
Campaign tracking best practices
Because campaign tracking uses parameters to gauge campaign performance, understanding how to effectively choose and use parameters is crucial to successful tracking. Marketers should use the following best practices to maximize campaign tracking ROI:
- Use standardized parameters: Helps companies get clean campaign data. Without standardized parameters, organizations often use variations of the same parameter. Even the slightest variation, like capital and lowercase letters, makes tracking the success of individual parameters messy and unorganized.
- Avoid tagging internal links: Parameters for natural referrers like internal links aren’t necessary. Campaign tracking efforts should focus on sources that aren’t covered by the referrer information provided by Google Analytics, like email, social, offline, and affiliate campaigns.
- Know how to use different UTM parameters: There are five different UTM parameters that have been listed above. Understanding how these parameters work is crucial to creating a clear picture of campaign performance.
Martha Kendall Custard
Martha Kendall Custard is a former freelance writer for G2. She creates specialized, industry specific content for SaaS and software companies. When she isn't freelance writing for various organizations, she is working on her middle grade WIP or playing with her two kitties, Verbena and Baby Cat.
