Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking what happens on your website, but it is equally powerful for what happens just before someone comes to your website! While tracking the referring source for your website visits happens automatically, when you are running a complex campaign with multiple advertising mediums and multiple entry points, setting it up right is critical to getting the data you want long term.
Landing Pages
The first thing to consider is where are you sending your visitors when they come in from the ad? Ideally, you don’t just want to drop them on your home page. In a perfect world, every visitor would come to a customized landing page that is closely tied to the ad they saw, where they saw it and when they saw it. But, since we live in a real world of budgets, let’s just focus on the first one, which ad they saw. Unless you are doing a huge branding campaign, your ads should have a call-to-action, either to go to the web, call an 800 number or go to the store. Since we are talking about web analytics, let’s assume the first case. So for each ad creative that you are running, you should have a landing page that matches the message and allows the visitor to fulfill the call-to-action from the ad.
Each of these landing should have a unique URL and be properly configured with Google Analytics tracking. Every page should have a clear call-to-action and that action should be tracked, whether it is a click, a form submit or interaction with multimedia. I’m not going to go into detail how to track each of those here, but just remember that everything needs to be tracked. For multi-step conversions, also consider setting up a GA goal and conversion funnel. If you have the time/budget and really want to make the landing page work for you, consider optimizing the page with varying headlines, images or calls-to-action (all within the context of the ad).
Tracking your Media
Now that we’ve got a strategy for landing pages, let’s consider how our visitors are coming into the site. At a high-level, there are three types of media that we want to track: offline/traditional advertising, paid search advertising and display (banner/rich media) advertising. While there are some similarities, each has it’s own unique set of parameters and considerations.
Traditional Media
Television, magazine, newspaper and radio are definitely the most challenging mediums to track with any accuracy since there is no direct pass through from ad to the website. You are relying on people remembering the URL and then typing that into their browser. Without any intentional tracking, the majority of this will come across as direct traffic with no referrer. If you are starting a new campaign, you will probably also see a lift in search traffic due to people not remembering the exact URL or just using search instead of the address box in their browser.
The best way to track this traditional media traffic is with a specific URL for each ad. There is a lot of debate about the best way to handle this, but I’ll try to lay out the options and my reasoning for and against each.
- Option 1 - Custom domains for each ad – in this setup, you come up with a group of domain names that make sense for your brand/campaign and use those in your ads. For example, if you have a snow plowing business you could buy jimssnowplow.com, jimssnowremoval.com, plowyourdriveway.com, clearmydriveway.com, etc. The down side to this is you can create a very mixed branding message and cause more confusion than good.
- Option 2 – URLs with media type – this is probably the most common scenario you’ll see where an ad has the media type or publication name after the domain. For example, jimssnowplow.com/tv or jimssnowplow.com/timemag. Although I don’t have the data to prove it, I think people are smart enough to realize that typing the “tv” or “timemag” after the URL isn’t necessary and they’ll just go to your home page.
- Option 3 – targeted URLs – this is my recommended solution and although not perfect, has the best chance of succeeding. In this case, much like Option 2, you use your primary domain (jimssnowplow.com) but you append short words after it that tie to the ad’s call-to-action. If you are giving a way a free shovel, use jimssnowplow.com/shovel/. If you are having a contest, use /contest/. And so on. The key is to come up with a unique URL for each ad, meaning if you are running a contest in three different magazines, use /contest/, /sweepstakes/ and /win/.
No matter which of these you use, you will need to track the incoming visit with a custom Google Analytics campaign URL. To do this, you will need to build a custom tracking URL using Google’s URL Builder and then setup the domain/folder to redirect to that URL (you’ll probably need developer/IT support for this). For the URL builder, you need to input several points of information for your ad. Here’s my recommendation for those fields:
- Campaign Source: The advertiser you are driving from (Time Magazine, Cable, etc.)
- Campaign Medium: television, magazine, radio, outdoor, newspaper
- Campaign Content: Ad description (30sec-blizzard, 15sec-plow, fullpage-shovel)
- Campaign Name: “Winter 2010 Traditional”
The campaign source may be difficult to pinpoint narrowly and the campaign name might change depending on the big picture of what else is happening within your advertising.
Paid Search
Tracking paid search is much easier 1) since it is 100% digital and 2) all the search ad companies know that tracking is important. If you are using Google AdWords, the setup is easy. Under My Account, Account Preferences, make sure that Tracking “Auto-Tagging” is set to “Yes”. That’s it.
For Yahoo and Microsoft, it is a little more difficult, but not too bad. You have to build the URLs manually for each ad, but by using the keyword variable, you can automatically insert the keyword within your ad group, so you get a more fine-grained tracking.
- Campaign Source: “Yahoo” (or Microsoft)
- Campaign Medium: “cpc”
- Campaign Keyword: {OVKEY} (for Yahoo) or {keyword} for Microsoft
- Campaign Name: “Winter 2010 Yahoo-Search”
This will setup the tracking in a way similar to Google AdWords, which gives you consistent reporting. If you want to track conversions in the reporting from Yahoo or Microsoft, you’ll also need to put a tracking code in your conversion page(s). Yahoo conversion tracking and Microsoft conversion tracking are easy to configure and you can see their sites for that information. If you would like to read more on PPC tracking there is a good article on the PPC Hero blog.
Banner/Rich Media
The final medium I want to cover is online display advertising. There are many players in this space and for the most part, the tracking process is the same. Like in the other cases, you need to build a tracking URL with the GA URL Builder and put that into your network’s ad system. Also much like the others, there is a conversion tracking code for on-site conversions (great breakdown of DoubleClick DART spotlight code). What is a little different is that each network may allow for different types of tracking. Since Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all do display advertising too, that process is the same as Paid Search, but your medium is “banner”. For other networks you will use something like the setup below:
Campaign Source: Network Partner (casale, collective, etc.) Campaign Medium: “banner” Campaign Content: Ad description (160x600-blizzard, 300x250-plow, etc.) Campaign Name: “Winter 2010 Online Display”
While I didn’t go into the details of every ad type (mobile advertising, affiliate programs and product engines), they are all part of the consideration and will also need to be carefully tracked and measured using similar techniques.
Last week I was part of the first annual Data Driven Conference put on by 
