Are you using Campaign Tagging to track online and offline advertising?

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to speak at Online Marketer’s Bootcamp event about Facebook Advertising.

I asked for a quick show of hands on how many people were using some kind of analytics to track their website’s metrics. The result was a resounding affirmative. Big tick!

I was explaining how we use campaign UTM tagging to track the effectiveness of Facebook Ads and all online (and where possible offline) channels against website goals and revenue. Again I asked for a quick show of hands on how many people used UTM Tagging to track their marketing campaigns through Google Analytics, but this time there was just a couple of people who put their mitts in the air.

Luckily, speaking after me was Rod Jacka the founder of one of Australia’s best known analytics agencies; Panalysis. What Rod doesn’t know about Analytics probably isn’t worth knowing. Rod stepped the audience through the importance of tagging and tracking campaigns and how easy it is to set it all up. Fantastic stuff! For many, the clouds parted and the sunshine shone through.

I regularly receive eNewsletters from all sorts of companies and I’m often really surprised at how few use any form of tracking in their emails. Examples include the excellent Get Elastic email newsletter which sends through great tips and tricks on increasing conversions from real world case studies. It’s somewhat ironic that they don’t track email traffic. Digital ministry is another as is the Victorian State Government and Kmart.

When it comes to sending emails there are two sides to the equation. There’s the data your email platform tells you about – open rates, unsubscribes, which links got clicked and the rest. But I think it’s way more important to know what’s happening when the traffic hits your site; and you can’t do that without campaign tagging each and every link within your emails.

And it’s not just email you should be tagging. All campaign sources, both online and off should be tracked when it’s feasible. If you don’t track your campaigns, the traffic referrer in analytics shows up as either as “direct” or lumped in as say, “Facebook”. Not very helpful and you have little or no way of gaining an insight into your campaign ROI.

Offline we’ve helped companies gain really valuable insights into which radio station or which newspaper they should advertise with. Our clients can clearly see which station or paper is driving the most traffic and revenue. Pretty handy when you’re allocating advertising spend.

If you don’t know how, it’s really easy to set this up.

The secret lies in vanity URL’s.

When you advertise offline, create a vanity URL as the call to action which is short, easy to remember and benefit driven. It’s not always easy but with some imagination and planning nearly always possible. One example might be for your radio campaign creative you can make and exclusive offer associated with the vanity URL. So for example the Call To Action might be “…simply visit www.yoursite.com.au/3aw to take advantage of this exclusive ‘3AW only’ offer!”. (People from Melbourne will know which radio station I’m talking about).

The next step is to redirect the vanity URL to your tracked landing page URL: https://www.yoursite.com.au/3AW-offer-page.html?utm_source=3AW&utm_medium=Radio&utm_campaign=Your-Campaign-Name

The utm_source, medium and campaign data is then recorded in your Google Analytics account under Traffic Sources | campaigns.

To generate a UTM tag for your campaign URL’s simply visit Google’s UTM Tagging tool.

I know this stuff is probably telling many of you how to suck eggs, but based on the straw poll at Online Marketer in Sydney, I’d say it may not be.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.