Campaign tracking

Web analytics is really rewarding when you have an online store. Let's take a very simplistic example. Imagine that 10,000 visitors have visited your website. They have placed 300 orders. If you know nothing else, you think "that's nice".

But if I told you that the 5,000 from Google accounted for 30 orders and the other 5,000 from Facebook accounted for the remaining 270 orders, you'd probably say "that's interesting" - and put more effort into your Facebook advertising, right?

But the reality is far more complex than that. You might also get visitors from a QR code and from a PDF guide you've created. You also get visitors from your newsletter and from a multitude of other sites.

When a visitor comes from another site, your web analytics software (most people use Google Analytics) can detect it. But it's far worse if they come from, for example, a PDF document. Because they read a PDF document in a PDF reader. When they click on a link to your webshop, the browser opens and starts on your website. Since Google Analytics only has access to something in the browser (and not to your computer's other programs), it will think "ah - this user just started the browser and typed the URL into the address bar". And Google Analytics will now mark this visitor in the category "Those who started on the site" AKA "Direct traffic". But this is far from the case.

The same issue happens when you send an email. If your user checks the email in e.g. Gmail, Gmail will be listed as a referring website. But it's actually your newsletter (or a transactional email) that should get the credit.

Even worse, if they open their email in Outlook. Then exactly the same thing happens as with the PDF reader, the user opens a browser and is attributed as a "direct visitor".

That's why we have campaign tracking

But this can be solved with campaign tracking. In campaign tracking, you put some extra parameters on the link. Google Analytics reads these parameters and then overwrites what it thought the visitor came from. An example might look like this

https://gilpa.dk/?utm_source=magasin&utm_medium=pdf&utm_campaign=hvalpefoder&utm_content=traendinhundehvalp

Here you can see the different parameters such as "utm_source" and "utm_campaign". These are the parameters that Google will read and note that this is the source your visitor came from.

You can use the tool here when you need to do campaign tracking on your links.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.