Digital Analytics Campaign Tracking Codes Part 2: Governance, Keeping them Clean and Actionable within your Measurement Platform
This is part two of a two-part series on Digital Analytics Campaign Tracking Codes. Through this series we will explore tracking code structures, how to keep the proper governance once created, and explore tools to make tracking codes easier to maintain and scale.
Now comes the fun part, keeping the tracking codes clean and actionable at scale. As you start rolling campaigns out to market you need to come up with a plan to make reporting easy and maintainable. Most likely if you are using Adobe Analytics you will be using a Campaign Classification structure / hierarchy to create a business translation layer. Google Analytics has something similar called Channel Grouping.
Let’s start with the campaign tracking code structure we created in Part 1 and take you through two easy examples in Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics.
Adobe Analytics
Classifications are very powerful for reporting, analyis, and data aggregation for Campaign Tracking Codes. Here is the campaign tracking code structure from Part 1 –
channel_geography_campaign_campaignH1_campaignH2_goal_device
Within the Classification Admin you can create folders based on the business taxonomy with Classification rules or lookups. We can start by defining a folder structure within the Campaign Variable in Adobe Analytics (see image to the right).
Having this folder structure helps with data aggregation for reporting and analysis. What if you want to see how all Prospecting ads are performing? You can click into the Goal Folder and aggregate your data based on Prospecting vs. Remarketing for ALL campaigns.
Adobe Analytics has two methods to create Classifications; if you are going to create Classifications, I recommend you read through the two links below –
- Classifications Importer – this method lets you bulk-upload classification data into your respective Report Suite via FTP or Browser Import (within the Adobe Analytics Admin).
- Classification Rule Builder – this method lets you create classification based on rules using regular expressions. For the Channel classification above, let’s create a simple one in Adobe Analytics:
- Navigate to Admin > Classification Rule Builder
- Select your Report Suite(s) and Variable(s).You can set classifications across multiple report suites and variables.I recommend doing this on a Dev, QA, or Non-production Adobe Analytics Report Suite first to test it.
- Select Add Rule
- Create a set of rules based on Channel Valid Values, see example below –
- Click “Test Rule Set” within the Classification Rule Builder. You can insert example Campaign Tracking Codes and test to make sure they are collecting in the right folder structure.
- Navigate to Admin > Classification Rule Builder
This is a simple example, but regular expressions can be very powerful when attempting to setup. For advanced Adobe Analytics power users, you could also leverage Processing Rules to transform the tracking code and parse it by a delimited field.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) has a similar solution to Adobe called Channel Groupings within the Admin. There can be some differences depending on where you store the Campaign Tracking Code within your GA Property, but for this example we will be storing our Tracking Code in the Campaign Variable (the utm_campaign parameter). Like Adobe Analytics, GA supports Regular Expressions to bucket tracking codes into folder structures. Let’s use our same folder structure (to the right) we used above for Adobe Analytics and translate to a GA example –
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Login to your respective GA Property Admin.
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Navigate to Channel Settings > Channel Groupings
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Click on + New Channel Grouping
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Simliar to Adobe Analytics, you can create Channels based on valid values of your tracking codes.
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Navigate to the Channels report in your respective GA Property and there you will find the Channels setup.
#2
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Maintain the tracking codes
Now that you have a powerful reporting structure within your measurement platforms you need to be able to maintain them by making sure they stay in the defined folder structure. Here are a few tips and tricks to keep these folder structures actionable:
- Cross-functional team Monthly or Quarterly audits are recommended to review the data populating in the folder structures. It is as simple as looking at the Raw Tracking Codes within the folders and making sure they align to your valid value mappings. Usually this is best done with the stakeholders responsible for creating Campaign Tracking codes – Agency Partners, Media Teams, Ecommerce Teams, and Analytics.
- Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics both offer alerting capabilities to mobile phones or email. You can setup alert criteria based on drops or rises in Campaign Data being captured. A good example is to set an alert for visits where Channel = Unspecified or Unknown. Alert capabilities will help you be more proactive in-between those Monthly audits.
- Create a Classification Folder / Channel Grouping for bad campaign tracking codes. Once tracking codes are out in the media space, you can usually start identifying issues that happen within the tracking code; e.g. percent signs due to URL encoding, missing macros, or macros encoded. You can create rules and logic within the measurement platforms to group these bad tracking codes in a single folder. Of course, you will need to have alignment within your organization on this approach.
Hopefully some of these tips will help you keep your Campaign Tracking Code measurement actionable. In Part 3 of this series we will review what Campaign Tracking Code Governance tools are and an evaluation of the major players in this space.
