How do I monitor a Campaign using Siteimprove?

What are Campaigns?

Here Campaigns refer to inbound marketing activities used to bring customers to your website. These can be both paid and organic marketing campaigns.

Campaigns are used as way to promote a product or service through different media, including email, social media, search engines, online adverts, etc.

For example, you might pay for a Google Ad linking to a special offer on your website.

In analytics terms, campaign data is generated based on UTM links containing UTM parameters. All traffic to your website containing UTM parameters will be considered campaign traffic. See "Parameters and their tracking options in analytics" to learn more about using UTM parameters/codes in Siteimprove Analytics. 

Why do I want to monitor Campaigns?

Being able to observe exactly where visitors come from, what type of link they clicked and what campaign the clicks is connected to, allows you to improve your customer engagement and your Return on Investment (ROI) by providing the insights necessary to optimize your campaign efforts when it comes to budget allocations, mix of traffic channels, etc.

Tracking campaigns is important if you want to ensure your efforts are paying off.

If they are not paying off, you can adjust the messaging, source, medium etc. to improve the campaign success rate.

Campaign data (based on the UTM links) are automatically collected in Siteimprove, but by setting up a Monitored Campaign you can add information about a specific set of UTM links providing an easier overview and ready-to-go valuable insights that are otherwise not presented in Analytics.

How do I monitor a Campaign?

We will use the example above to describe how to monitor a campaign using Siteimprove.

Let’s say your organization runs a Google Ad to the special offers page on the website for a month.

In the coming month (July) you especially want customers to click on the ‘T-Shirt’ offer.

You’re so keen to sell these T-shirts that you put it on your Facebook page as well.

So how do you monitor how successful this ‘T-shirt campaign’ has been?

1. Go to Analytics > Campaigns > Campaign Overview.
2. Give the Campaign a name and click on “Create Campaign”.
3. Enter the campaign details as outlined below.

Campaign details

You can add the following details:

• Display name* - This is used for reporting purposes on graphs and on the campaign overview page. In this case we will use the display name ‘T-Shirt’.
• Campaign Name* -This will be a URL parameter (utm_campaign) used as the defining campaign name in UTM links. We will fill this out automatically and using best practices for UTM building. It’s always lowercase and in this case, ‘t-shirt’.
• Auto-detect UTM links in Campaigns -You have the option to auto-detect UTM links using this checkbox. This means that all analytics traffic that matches the utm_campaign value is automatically added to the monitored campaign.
• Campaign start/end date* - Enter the dates over which the campaign is running. This will be used to keep track of campaign schedules. In this case, the campaign will cover the month of July.
• Campaign goal – The goal lets you measure campaign performance based on desired user activity on your website. We recommend you add a goal when possible. The goal will be linked to Key Metric completions. Key Metrics can be set up beforehand in the Key Metric section, but you can add the Key Metric goal to the campaign at a later stage. Read more about Key Metrics.
• Budget - Budget serves as a performance benchmark over the course of the campaign to help give an indication of the Return on Investment (ROI), Cost per completion, and Cost per visit.

All fields except Campaign Name (utm_campaign) can be edited after the Monitored Campaign has been set up.

*Note: Display name, Campaign Name, and Start date are mandatory fields.

Once you’ve added the Campaign Details. Click “Next” and then you’ll need to “Add UTM links”.

Add UTM links

Here you have the option to create either,  

• One URL with multiple sets of parameters, or
• Multiple URLs with one set of parameters

In this case you would use “One URL with multiple sets of parameters” to track visits to the ‘T-shirt’ page from different sources (i.e. Google & Facebook).

If you wanted to track different pages linked from the same source you could use “Multiple URLs with one set of parameters”. This could be the case if you are only running your campaign on, e.g. Instagram, but the campaign contains links to multiple pages on your website (e.g. different product pages).

Click on “One URL with multiple sets of parameters”,

Now you can add the details required to track the scenarios in our example.

Landing Page URL – In this case this is the URL of the T-Shirt Offer Page. Note: This page must be on the domain of the site set up in your Siteimprove analytics, as we would otherwise not be able to collect the data.

Campaign Name - The campaign name will be used as the value for the ‘UTM_campaign’ parameter in the URL (i.e. ‘t-shirt’).

UTM parameters – UTM tags are used to helps you distinguish the source of your campaign traffic. In this case, we want to track both Facebook visits to the T-Shirt offer page and visits due to the Google Ad. Being able to distinguish between these helps you to analyze and adjust campaign performance.

When adding parameters, you have the option of using preset parameter pairs or adding parameters from each parameter category. You can use UTM presets to add your own source/medium presets and preset pairs. See “Analytics: Campaign UTM Presets” for further information.

Source - The location where the link is placed (e.g. Google/Facebook)

Medium - The traffic medium on which the link was clicked (e.g. Pay per click (ppc)/social).

It is not necessary, but you also have the option to add tags for ‘content’ and/or ‘term’ if required.

Content (optional) - Used to differentiate content that points to the same link, e.g. two call-to-action link texts within the same email.

Term (optional) - Term is often used to be specific about tracking context such as a keyword, targeting or audience used in the campaign.

When you have added the parameters, click on ‘Generate UTM links’ to create the links that will be used for the T-Shirt campaign.

Review the list of URLs created and click Save.

The campaign you’ve created is now showing in the table of Monitored Campaigns which gives an overview of all Monitored Campaigns for the selected website.

Expanding the UTM Links column on this table displays the links that you should use in the Google Ad and on Facebook for the T-Shirt Campaign.

You can copy the complete link, or the useful shortened link version provided. You also have options add, import, download and email links related to the campaign.

Once you’ve added a campaign, and traffic starts arriving from the UTM links created, data will be visible in both Campaign Monitor and Campaign Comparison.

The date picker on the top of the page will also affect the campaign data show.