Why do I have to "tag" my campaigns in order to track them?

It’s a question that we are asked time and time again. What is the point of tagging my campaigns, can’t my web analytics software just work it out?

The answer is unfortunately no. All web analytics software products need to have a way in which they can correctly attribute a click to a campaign. The way that most of these do this is to use additional information on the web page’s address to tell it that this is a click from an advertisement. These are generally added as “query parameters” to the end of the web page’s address (the URL). Some products such as Google Analytics, Hit Box and others have a special way in which you specify this information and you will need to know this in order to get campaigns working. Others like ClickTracks are configured to look for certain patterns when you run the reports. Either way you need to be familiar with how to do this for your particular tool.

The reason that these tools can’t just work it out is that there is uncertainty about whether a click can be correctly matched to a campaign unless we specifically add extra information that could only have come from that campaign. This is especially true for search engines such as Google. The following example illustrates the problem.

Panalysis has been advertising under the keywords Web Analytics for a long time. The site ranks at #1 in Google Australia when the “sites in Australia” option is checked, but we don’t want to miss out on clicks when the user chooses to search for the entire web.
 

As you can see Panalysis has two links in the search results screen shown above. The link Web Analytics Experts and the link Web Analytics and Search Marketing Specialists.

Regardless of which of these links you click on the browser will send the same information to the Panalysis web server when these links are clicked on. The reason for this is a little technical but it helps to understand the problem.

Both links are located at the page:

http://www.google.com.au/search?num=100&hl=en&rls=GGGL%2CGGGL%3A2006-28%2CGGGL %3Aen&q=web+analytics&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryAU

If a visitor click’s on the link their web browser will send certain information to the Panalysis web server. This is known as the HTTP headers and it tells the web server what page that has been asked for and some information about the user’s browser and the last page that they were on. The following two examples show the two clicks from the same search results.

GET / HTTP/1.1
…
Referer: http://www.google.com.au/search?num=100&hl=en&rls=GGGL%2CGGGL%3A2006-28%2CGGGL %3Aen&q=web+analytics&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryAU

Both of these links are on the same page, so if they click on the paid search advertisement they will be taken to a different page but they will have exactly the same referrer

GET /services/web_analytics.php?s=google&m=cpc&k=web+analytics&c=p_wanalytics_2&n= p_wanalytics&gclid=CK-ohPzYh4wCFReHhgodAUGA4w HTTP/1.1

Referer: http://www.google.com.au/search?num=100&hl=en&rls=GGGL%2CGGGL%3A2006-28 %2CGGGL %3Aen&q=web+analytics&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryAU

The referring page is identical between the two clicks ClickTracks, Google Analytics and other web analytics products will use the referring page to extract the search keywords that they show in the search reports. The only way that the software can tell which of these are paid advertising and which are not are based on the different addresses of the pages.

Whilst it could be reasonable for a person who deeply understood their site to say but page X doesn’t rank for keyword Y so it must be a paid campaign, web analytics applications aren’t that smart. They need to be told exactly which keywords and clicks belong to the campaign and hence that is why you need to add the extra parameters to your web page addresses in your campaigns.

For assistance with tagging and measuring your advertising campaigns please contact Panalysis