Visitor Insights

Ever wonder how you can track the performance of your onsite campaigns and promotions with Google Analytics?

The first instinct is to use Google’s campaign functionality to track their effectiveness. The problem with the approach though is that you’ll be overriding your external campaigns. Consider this scenario: the visitor comes from an email campaign that’s being tracked through Google Analytics and once on site, he/she clicks on the internal campaign, overriding the email campaign. When the conversion occurs, the campaign that takes credit is the internal one, falsely leading you to think that your email campaign is not performing.

So what to do in this case? The solution is to use another Google Analytics feature for internal campaign tracking to make sure your internal campaigns do not override your acquisition programs. Additionally, consider the scenario where you may have several internal campaigns or promotions that are displayed on the page at random. For example, in one impression the visitor may get exposed to promotions A and B, and upon refreshing the page the same visitor may get exposed to promotions B and C. An example of this can be seen at the bottom of the Wells Fargo home page shown below (note: not a client). In this case, it’s not only critical to track the clicks, but also impressions because the combined data points will give you the campaign click-through rates.

In this solution, we’ve developed a script that lets you track the effectiveness of your internal campaigns using Google Analytics’ new Event Tracking feature. The reason we selected Event Tracking is because we wanted an easy way to track both impressions (for rotating banners and offers) and clicks.

So how does this work? First, download the toolkit, which consists of the script and the instructions. This solution will let you tag the links for which you want to track impressions and clicks with a query parameter. By adding the query parameter onto the destination URLs, the script will track both impressions and clicks automatically.

Here’s an example: consider you have a total of 5 promotions on your home page that rotate randomly (like the Wells Fargo home page). The destination URLs for these five promotions are:

http://www.site.com/promotion1.html

http://www.site.com/promotion2.html

http://www.site.com/promotion3.html

http://www.site.com/promotion4.html

http://www.site.com/promotion5.html

By adding the parameter “promo_id” to each one of these destination URLs, the script will automatically track impressions for each of the links and also the clicks on the click through event. The only thing that you’ll have to do is to add the provided script to the page and add user-friendly parameters to the destination URLs. The following is a sample of what the resulting destination URLs would look like:

http://www.site.com/promotion1.html?promo_id=promo1_home

http://www.site.com/promotion2.html?promo_id=promo2_home

http://www.site.com/promotion3.html?promo_id=promo3_home

http://www.site.com/promotion4.html?promo_id=promo4_home

http://www.site.com/promotion5.html?promo_id=promo5_home

Sounds simple enough? Well it is. Now on to the reports. Upon the page load, the links tagged with a “promo_id” parameter will send an event tracking request to Google Analytics with the category: “promotions”, action: “impressions”, and label being whatever you’ve entered in the “promo_id” parameter. On the click event, the script will send another Event Tracking request with the category: “promotions”, action: “clicks” and label being the value passed in the “promo_id” parameter. The result is that you get true link impression and click tracking inside Google Analytics. The reports can then be viewed in the Event Tracking section of the interface, with categories showing “promotions”, Actions reporting on the number of impressions and clicks and Labels showing you the actual links being tracked.

Of course this comes with its limitations. First, Event Tracking is still in beta and not everyone has access to this feature yet. Next, you do not want to get carried away and use this for every link on your site. Google Analytics limits you to 10 events per page and no more than 500 total events for the entire session. So we recommend that you only use this for a handful of critical onsite promotions, mainly rotating promotions. The default script has a limit of 5 links to be tracked per page, which can be configured. Finally, it is imprtant to note that if you use this on your landing pages, it will impact your bounce rates. The extra event created via the impression tracking will eliminate any potential for a bounce, reducing your bounce rate. There is a mechanism to delay the impression tracking that is detailed in the distribution. This will allow you to only track promotion impressions for users spending X number of seconds on the page in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the bounce rate metric.

Web Analytics, Web Analytics Implementation google analytics, Web Analytics, web analytics consulting

As more companies are leveraging social media marketing and online PR in their marketing mix, one of the questions that is brought up is the relationship between social media marketing and search marketing (or pay-per-click advertising). Do they complement each other or do they target the same audience?

To assess this, we’ve used our own press release campaign as a case study. More specifically, we were interested in knowing the overlap between the PR and PPC audiences. The results: the two are very complementary.

First the background: the press release was launched on January 21 and can be found here. The release was also picked by a number of bloggers covering the social media and online PR measurement landscape. Simultaneously, we ran a series of PPC campaigns around social media and PR measurement as shown below. The question to ask is whether these two campaigns are reaching the same audience or are different ones.

In order to analyze the results, we’re using web analytics solutions (Google Analytics and NetInsight in our case). The results inside the web analytics solutions reveal no overlap whatsoever between the two campaigns. In other words, those who came to our site as a result of PPC did not have any exposure to either our press release or the blogger coverage of it. This is done thanks to the Tealium Social Media product. Let’s look at some of the analysis.

First, we’re going to look at the AdWords report inside Google Analytics. This is shown in the figure below. However, we need to also look at the overlap of the report with the social media segment. The social media segment is an additional segment that clients of our social media measurement service get access to. It allows you to compare what percentage of your traffic has been previously exposed to your social media and online PR (examples are PR stories and blog coverages).

We expected very little overlap between the two campaigns. In other words, we expected that our press release and blogger coverage targets a different audience than AdWords. But we did not expect the two to be mutually exclusive. Out of the 107 visits generated to the site as a result of PPC advertising, not a single one previously viewed our press release or read any of the blogs covering the release. This even holds true for the contextual advertising portion of our PPC campaign.

Now let’s take a closer look at the effectiveness of these two campaigns. For this, we’re going to look at the key performance indicators of the two campaigns, which is shown below. We can see surprisingly strong performance by the PR campaign. For example, the site conversion rate of the social media campaign is at 11.5%, only slightly lower than search advertising. At the same time, the cost per visit for the PR campaign is just slightly lower than search advertising.

The benefits of search advertising have long been known: you reach an audience that’s ready to buy at the most critical stage. But the fact that PR campaigns enjoy a similar performance means that online PR can be as effective as search advertising.

To reiterate, this study is for one site only and other sites may not experience the same effect, so you should take this into consideration. But marketers are well served adding online PR and social media marketing into their marketing mix. Not only does it target an audience that’s complementary to search advertising, but it also enjoys a level of success that’s in tune with PPC advertising, with similar cost per visit, cost per conversion and conversion rates. So go ahead – start experimenting.

SEM, Social Media online marketing, PR Measurement, SEM, Social Media, social media measurement, Web Analytics