Campaign Tracking Codes: The Critical Key to Accurate Marketing Metrics

Kate Vostokova 00:10 Hello, hello everyone. Welcome. Let's give me just one minute so I can add our experts and we will start a webinar. In the meantime, let me know if you can hear me well. Please let me know in the chat Thank you. Thank you. Hi Casper. Kasper Rasmussen 00:49 Hello. Okay. Kate Vostokova 00:50 Hi. Hi. Nice to meet again. Let's wait for Andy and forever. Attendees don't have much right now in the room oh, Andy is here Hi, sorry, Andy Crestodina 01:54 hi. No problem. Kate Vostokova 01:55 For some reason I see my name on do you know it's super strange. It's like three kids here. So okay, I'm letting you Andy Crestodina 02:07 know, probably problem, Kate Vostokova 02:08 but I should rename you because right now, I don't know. Andy Crestodina 02:14 My name like surprised I can change that. I could never be UK. Kate Vostokova 02:23 Okay, okay, so we are here. Okay, let's start maybe production. We don't have many people yet, but I think people will join and like a couple of minutes. Um, so let me first make an introduction to myself. So my name is Kate. I'm an Event Marketing Manager at smart kid. And today, we will be starting our content marketing marathon. It's a series of free events that we prepared for you that will be live every Thursday starting from today at 11am. Eastern Time, 5pm Central European Time. And we invited several marketing experts to talk about topics like content analytics, international SEO, content strategies to enter local markets, etc. So today, as probably you know, we will start with marketing metrics precisely how to use a campaign tracking codes to measure campaign results. And I want to present the two great marketing experts that I have today with me in the room. First is Andy Andy Crestodina. And he is a co founder and chief marketing officer at Orbitz medium it's an award winning digital agency in Chicago. And you can probably met Andy at many different marketing conferences. You probably also read his blogs because he writes a lot of marketing works. And he's also an offer of content chemistry, which is an illustrated handbook for content marketing. And good news that this book will be today a price for the most active attendees and I will tell you later how you can win this book. And our second speaker Casper Casper is the CEO and co founder of acute x, which is a marketing data management platform that helps organizations streamline campaign tracking, and combine campaign data and assess campaign performance in Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics. Customer has previously worked as a web analytics consultant and also head of business reporting and this experience gives him unique insights into how to bridge the gap between marketing data analysis and the business and I hope he will share his insights with us today. So before we go into the main part of our event, I will just maybe quickly go through the structure. We will start with some slides that end in passper has prepared for you after that we will have Have a short quiz. Or if you will be attend owl. He'll listen attentively to Casper and and it will be not a problem for you to win this quiz and to get the price that you prepared. And after the quiz will go to an expert discussion and to q&a session. Yes. And basically, we hope to end in one hour, starting from now. And I think that's it from my side. Oh, of course, the recording will be available. However, I if you need to leave, of course, we'll get the recording, but better stay with us, because I think it will be super interesting. Yeah, I think that's it for me. Andy, can you, you can start. Andy Crestodina 05:44 Sounds good. Thank you. Okay. I'm glad to be here. I love this topic. And I love this. This group, I've gotten to know Casper a little bit. And it's relevant to everybody who does any kind of marketing, and who uses specific channels and specific activities and efforts to drive traffic to our properties to our websites. And then, so I'm going to cover this at a very high level. And then we're gonna have Casper take it to another level explaining how to do this in a way that is scalable, that has better attribution, that is better for collaboration better for enterprise better for global teams, which is, of course, highly relevant here with collaborating with SmartCAT, which is part of a global platform with global audience. Okay, so I'm going to jump in. This is, tell me if you can see my slide. I've got a statistic up here, Kate, does that look, okay? Yes. This is why all of you are doing the right thing for your individual careers today, beyond your brand, beyond your employer beyond your company. This is the skill, what we're taught what we're doing today, this is the skill that is in most demand. This is the gap. This is what employers are looking for in candidates don't have 95% of employers report the job candidates with analytic skills are hard to find. So what we're going to do today is to help you all get better data in your analytics and learn how analytics really works. How do these dots connect, and relative to campaign traffic, and UTM tracking codes. So first, at the big picture, I'm gonna go quickly because many of you already understand this, I'm sure how traffic is categorized. If you look at Universal Analytics, and we can chat more about GA for later, if you'd like. in Universal Analytics, we get the default channel groupings. This is probably the most popular report one of the least probably two most popular reports. And there are issues with this. When you look at this, there's problems with this. Because Analytics doesn't know if that's the same person using a different device. They're all just called users. In fact, their devices. We don't know if the person came from a non browser traffic source, you send me a text message, I click on it. I'm a direct traffic visitor even though you shared a link with me, right? There's all kinds of reasons why any traffic from a non browser source has no referring data. Ga has a lot of trouble identifying social sources, right? Because it's a platform independent thing, right? Social is on apps, it's on websites, it's all over the place. And any single marketing effort as an ad campaign can appear in several different places. If your campaign reached me through an app, and I click, I'm probably direct. If it reaches me through a website, and I click I might be social effects of social website, if not maybe referred depends on with setup, it's a big problem. So bottom line, and a high level understanding versus set expectations, every number in your analytics is wrong. They're all wrong. There is no, there's not a single accurate number in Google Analytics that I know of. And that's fine. It's okay. The point is not to have the most accurate data in the world, the point is to have accurate enough data to make decisions. And without a little bit of work on our part, we're going to do this today, it's not going to be accurate enough to help us make good decisions. Big picture, every idea that you have as a marketer is actually just a hypothesis. That's how the data driven marketer and the measurement marketer thinks about these things. It's not just an idea, it's a hypothesis that can be prioritized with other hypotheses and then make a decision. So when you do that, when you take action, you're actually running a test more or less a pre post test, if nothing else, and then you can see if it worked, did it work? Did that campaign work to drive visitors but the visitors engaged? If not try it another idea. Marketing, you can keep trying experimentation. And if it worked in the impact, and there was an impact was it big? If not, try another idea. But if it was big, now you know what to double down on. Now you know what to focus on. Now you know where to spend your time and energy and budget, because those are the efforts that got you 10x results, very common for certain efforts in marketing to give you a 10x results and other things really much, much less. So the idea is to use the analytics to find those unicorns, those 10x outputs, and then we can double down on those. Now in terms of campaign, we need this data, we need better data, because if you just send an email, what do you get? You get delivery rates? Probably not At 7%, open rates, maybe 25%, click through rates click to open, maybe 5%. So that's it. That's it, you don't know what happened after they clicked, unless you add campaign tracking code, in which case you get the website engagement visits, you get bounce rate time on page pages per visit conversion rates. Now, you know, if that not just got clicks, but if it got engagement, if the visitors took action, how engaged are they relative to other campaigns. And now when you look at default channel groupings, which by default doesn't have it in there, where are your email visitors? Once you have set up campaign tracking codes for all those links that bring people to your website, now you get them separately, there they are, those are the email visitors that we were looking for. So fundamentally, very briefly, here's the mechanics of the of email tracking codes, I send that email. Here's an example. Here's an email, I send that email, email has the link, the link is right there. Right, click Link gets clicked visitor lands up in the address bar, there's some extra parameters. Parameters are sort of how browsers work. It's a it's a variables that appear after the URL, starting with the question mark, and then each separated by an ampersand that is visible to Google Analytics, therefore Google analysts can attribute to our goal here is accurate attribution, can attribute that visitor to that effort. Now, if you look closely at that link, here's the link. I've added. There's actually three things in there. Well, there's the link. And then there's the three parameters, the parameters are source, that's the specific origin of traffic, in this case, a newsletter medium, that's the broader origin of traffic, in this case, email, and the campaign name, whatever I wanted to call it, I can call it whatever I want. And when I call it that, it's going to show up in analytics as such. Now, if you look at these are added often using URL builders, they're called, and the URL builder is, here's one on our site, it's a very simple tool. In its basic form, that allows you to just type in the source, ours, you have to choose from a radio button, because we're standardizing it for the campaign medium, again, medium is the broader origin of traffic, then the campaign name, whatever you wanted to call it, stick in the campaign name. So now, our tool actually tries to preview it for you at the bottom to show you what that will likely look like in your Google Analytics. And then you can set these up for any kind of campaign. Here's an example of what it might look like for an email. The source, you can make it the newsletter, or I have friends who say make it the branded origin of the traffic, maybe you're using MailChimp, or something. Maybe it's a Facebook ad, CPC, that's sources Facebook campaign name is spring sale, source, medium campaign name, these are the three fundamental CASP was gonna go much farther into this, but I'm starting with the very high level, these are the three main campaign parameters. You'll see more in a minute. And then Twitter, medium is cost per 1000, or advertently. Display or whatever it is, sources Twitter, campaign name is event registration. Now, it's helpful to use lowercase letters. And a good tool will push lowercase letters not allow you to add uppercase letters to these because analytics will treat those separately. So if you spell email with a guy, you know, if you spell newsletter with a capital N, sometimes in a lowercase n, sometimes they'll show up separately, which is annoying. Because you might want to just filter and see all source equals newsletter and see them all in one place. Instead of having to have you have to do the math in your head. Not fun. So now I can answer questions like how much traffic is that campaign driving? Let's do it for social, how much traffic is that social campaign writing? Social media is obviously a data rich environment. It's a high engagement environment, there's lots of things a visitor can do. And all of those are sort of used as proxies by marketers to understand if that's an engaging post engaging post that's good it's good to have an engaging post but what do we really want it engaged visitor who want to conversion we're trying to drive leads here, we're not doing this for fun or or health we're doing this for business or, you know, if it doesn't lead to a business outcome and I and I want to know that because I want to iterate and get become a smarter marketer. should I even be on tick tock, whatever, whatever whatever that thing is, you're doing? Honestly, how can you resource planning without this? How can you do marketing without this? It's crazy to me that there's there are marketers that don't do this. If you're probably not one of those marketers, but if you are, today's the day when everything changes for you, and you'll get better attribution and more accurate data forever, such as visits from social bounce rate for visitors from social time on page pages for visits per visit for these visitors from social and the conversion rate. Do visitors from LinkedIn never become leads? You don't know. You're not getting campaign tracking code, add campaign tracking code and you will know you'll know the conversion rate you'll know the rate based on the page they land on. You'll know the rate based on you know you can get you can track your campaigns so that it's like social videos lead to greater conversions and regular social posts. All of that is knowable, it's knowable, because you can just add this little bit of code to the end of the thing and then when the visitor lands analytics categorizes them separately. Where do they appear? This I'm going And Miss Universal Analytics when it dies on July, whatever, 2023. If there's a poetic element to it, the way that it's structured is beautiful to me, because the three most important sections for reports are alphabetized. How nice, right? I have little kids, this reminds me, I should teach them analytics, ABC acquisition, behavior conversion, not only the alphabetized, but they're aligned with the funnel, where they came from acquisition, what they did behavior, and what percentage of profitable action for the business conversion rate. So obviously, a campaign data is in the acquisition reports, where they came from the campaign data is gonna be in there. And when you open that campaign data, that that section, there's gonna be a whole bunch of different reports. This is what's different about GA for there aren't a whole bunch of different reports, you have to build your reports. Basically, there's only like, 10 reports total, and all of GA for to open campaigns go to all campaigns. And there they are. These are the campaign names exactly as you named them, when you build the links in the campaign in the URL builder. Whatever you typed in there, that's how they're going to appear. So look, you could clearly this is my analytics. Clearly, these analytics, this report is showing email, because there's a spike for every email. I am confident in the accuracy of this data, at least insofar as it needs to be accurate, at least insofar as it's accurate enough for me to learn which of these sources has how much engagement, then I can see that topic, that timing, that list, that format. All of these things have more or less engagement once the visitor landed on the website opens are nice, but totally insufficient. I want to know behavior metrics, I want to know conversion metrics. Look, you can see over on the far right goal completions. So that's the game. That's what we're really doing here. That's what we want to introduce you today. This is something that pro level marketers never skip. We all do this all the time. It's something that you can do in all kinds of sources. I've got a link in the footer of all my emails, under my you know, in my email signature, it says read my latest article, I got 202 visits last year from that link. How do I know that I put campaign tracking code on it? How accurate is that? Plus or minus 5%? Good enough. Good enough, right? So these, this leads the opportunities that you that we all have. So that was the really high level basic Color by Number version of this. Now I'm going to introduce you to or you've already been introduced to a legit expert who does this for a living at a global scale. Someone I've learned a lot from about how this can be done at the enterprise level. Casper from acute x is not going to show us how to do much, much more with this when you're working in large accounts, many campaigns, simultaneous campaigns, large teams, disparate disparate teams around the world. So I'll stop sharing here and then Kaspar handed over to you. Kasper Rasmussen 17:53 What a nice introduction and, and great intro to GA, I mean, just share screen household and see if I can pick up where you left, essentially, I mean, trying to follow with the same pace for the do my best here. Let's see. All right, you can see you can see my screen. Yep, looks good. All good. All right, I'll try to take it take it a bit further. I mean, Andy, you created all the foundation, we have everything in place. Now we know what campaign trading is about. We know why to do it. We know I mean, the importance of it. And not at least how to do it as well. But as you said yourself, they can be taken to I mean, or even broader extent. So with Acuitas, we're working with clients, I mean, local clients in the same market here. We're based in Copenhagen, Denmark, by the way, so Danish clients, but we also work on a global scale here with Fortune 500, even fortune 100 companies. And there's lots of difference when you're doing campaign tracking the concepts is the same. I mean, the What the Why is the same. But the complexity of the taxonomy is different than when I say taxonomy actually mean a campaign structure. I'll go more into that in detail. But essentially, we're talking about what are we tracking for the different activities that are running activity being an email, or a Facebook ad, or a display campaign or anything like that. But the concept is, and as you said, I mean, one to optimize our media spend says, We want to drive as many conversions as you want for the future amounts of dollars, but a few months if it's essentially, we want to, I mean, for the local markets here. Well, our goal might be you want to have more budgets to drive more conversions, one increased profit, we want to prove our campaign performance, and that we actually succeeding in what we're doing here in a marketing context. The only way we can do this is by running our reports on our conversions, attributing that back to our media activities from campaign tracking. I mean, campaign tracking is the fundamental thing here. We could have behavioral reporting and all that within Google Analytics. But what really paste away is, I mean, one of sub products, right? The only way we can measure that is through linking from the media activity, through an insect through a website to the actual conversion that we're seeing. Notice that this correctly, we need to feed our our analytics with the right data, I mean the same thing as everything else here. I mean, so probably a bad analogy here. But the concept is, if you don't water the tree, if you don't give it enough nutrition, don't give it enough, they won't grow the same thing with the data you need to care about it. A taxonomy is basically the same campaign structure, we need to make sure that it's working as intended. If you have a very complex taxonomy, it will be different, it will require a lot of time. But if you have I mean, of course, a more simple one, for a smaller business. For something where I don't have that much requirement, it will definitely be simpler. But in all cases, which makes sure that it's followed consistently, if we don't follow a tracking strategy, I mean, if we don't have standardized way of tracking our activities, I mean, when you ended, when you send out emails, in your newsletters, you know how to track email you're doing consistently, you're always applying a UTM medium for email, for instance, the source might be your MailChimp, sources sending in alpha, and the campaign name might be the subject of the email that you sending out here. I mean, that will be a strategy that you follow, so you know how to report on, you can see what subjects drove the most traffic, it will all all be for the same email, it will be from the same source and so on. If you don't have that structure, well, we have the photo on the left here, we'll have a big pile of bricks or a big pile of traffic that will go into our GA account. I mean, essentially, if you don't have the right medium, I mean, it might be email, it might be I don't know, might have put newsletter in the email part of stuff, the source might have put, I don't know, I don't know anything else. And if you don't have a structure, it will be very difficult to do reporting. And that's what we actually see here from clients that don't have this in place is if you don't have a structure in place, a good process, you will spend I mean, five, up to 10 amounts of time and just searching and cleaning and reporting data, as you would have spent hours just putting the right tracking codes in place. I mean, it actually takes quite a lot of effort to do right reporting if you don't have this in place. On the other hand side, if you have a good structure, I mean, you will have the photo on the left here, very nicely ordered breaks, I mean, you can easily go down to the the value and actually create the reports, look at the insights and actually take action. I mean, that's that's the critical part here. You want to go from reporting to actually take an action that's and yours presented? Should we go back? I mean, is it working? If not do something else? If it is working? Well, then I mean, that's double down on that one, let's get the value from it. When you're talking about business sciences here, we often see that complexity is proportional with the business size. But the concept is I mean, please, I mean, it's actually not that difficult, always value quality over quantity. We see so many clients are saying, hey, we want to track what medium I mean, this CPC, is it social, what is it? I mean, it's it's such a social display, what source we want to have the business unit want to have to campaign side, one half, I mean campaign name, whatever place you want to know the creatives name, want to know, the creative size to tie all these things. Yeah, and if you don't know, if you don't use that data, it will just be wasted efforts in putting it in place. And don't do that start small and make it grow. It's like a, it's evolving, it's not going to be a revolution. It's an evolution in time that you have a growing taxonomy or tracking structure that will align with your business needs. Everything that you need to report on will be within the world because that's the little key here that extra dimension read activities, back to your reporting within analytics, and to see what you do have your conversions and the names of your UTM parameters. I mean, we have UTM source, medium campaign UTM, continuity and term that's actually the sixth one called ID. Let's not let's wait a bit with that one. But essentially, those are small pockets that you could put data adds to the URL. And this serve like as the as the as the truck that delivers to your values from other tracking values from your media platform, to analytics, and all of that nicely, so you can do reporting on it. So anything that you would like to track will need to be in these parameters. And from our Google analytics perspective, this will be what is normally prefixed with UTM s. And nd I can remember last time we had this discussion here, you quickly said, Oh, UTM that's the shorthand for version tracking module. Right? Andy Crestodina 24:07 That's right. I think that's internet history. It's trivia. But Lux was originally acquired, it was an old tool called earch, in which old people like me actually used, but isn't that leftover from that? Is that true? Or is it is it a rumor? Kasper Rasmussen 24:21 I think I mean, it's it's the best explanation and effort. I mean, at least that's what Andy Crestodina 24:25 I heard you UTM actually stands originally stood for merchant tracking module. Module. Exactly. So it's, it's a rumor I'm passing along. So verify before sharing. Kasper Rasmussen 24:38 It's always fun because we also have clients that transition from Google to Adobe and the other way around as well. But then they Adobe, they use their normal tracking few times. They don't change that. So now suddenly, we have urgent tracking arounds for GA that transition to Adobe. It's like a full cycle here. But yeah, but the concept is the same. Regardless of the analytics that you're using. It will always be in the yield as parameters because that's the transportation transportation you Add between your media platform you need activity to your website and where you're gonna track your activities. Whenever you have a big business, large business, enterprise business or smaller business, the Condamine fundamentals are the same. But the complexity difference, of course, if you and they are only sending your emails out to any of your users in, you know that they're all going to be within UK. I mean, you likely don't have to put the market in your tracking codes, because well, you know, they're from the UK. But if you're working from a global global enterprise, we're sitting in 50 plus 100 markets or so? Well, it will always be nice to know what market will actually targeting with our campaigns. Within our campaign reporting. There's a nice nice little report that we often see clients are doing here, let's say that we put in UK within our tracking parameters, because now we're targeting EU UK campaigns, if we sit sees that traffic starting coming in from any other markets, well, there might be something wrong with our target audience here. That could be an indication for that, at least, which might have something to do with our spend and the budgets and so on that Rachel allocating and the conversion rates because that are the market that suddenly became a part of our audience welcome words much worse than the UK targeting one which our budget was aligned to. So there's many things that you can you can derive from that the same thing with business units. Again, not sure how many you're sending an email from whether the business unit is und when you do your your email report or when the small right. But again, in global companies will have more business units, that might be interesting to see which bits engine is actually was responsible for certain conversions to their marketing efforts. It's often the case that you have budget split in these business units. And there is an internal policies and politics and all that you want to you need to report on what you're actually trying for your unit. And we all know that it takes more than one touch point to drive a conversion. It might be that you have education driving something to the website. But well, it's actually I don't know, the government's or the public, anything else that actually drove the conversion afterwards. And then you can do your attribution based on that, again, there's no single way to do attribution, it's up to you, is it linear, it's a nonlinear, it's a data driven. I mean, the you form the otherwise, I mean, there's so many different ones, but they will be business specific. It could also be to have products well, we want to include the targeted product in this because let's say that we're running a campaign now on Facebook for Apple outputs, but actually ends up with seeing that 20% of the ones withdrawn on your insert buying, I don't know attract 10 as well. Well, that could indicate about something for the audience as well, should we do some trust product alignment here, I mean, committee decision budgets by removing that segment from our target audience, putting that into another product category that we're targeting, there's many ways that we can do here. And having these three examples in mind, you can see that you'd send campaign structure at the bottom of the screen actually growth with these. So instead of just having a single campaign name within UTM campaign, we're building this string up here from a concatenated version of these different elements. Again, this is often seen, when you have a more I mean, going towards a more advanced tracking structure. Because we have the country, we have the locale, we have the language in the first part, then we're going to have the business unit, and then we're going to have to I mean, the product or the category and then the product afterwards. It makes it easy if you're doing it this way for you to do reporting within GA and isolating business unit out of your campaigns. I mean, this campaign here likely doesn't run only on Facebook, for instance, it perhaps runs on your search activities. It may be that it used the same campaign here in an email, it could be for display, it's very affiliate, it could be any offline. I mean, there's many channels that could drive traffic for this specific campaign. No, you can't. And using it this way here, you can easily isolate all education campaigns across all your channels and your sources into one specific view. Or we'll take all the UK campaigns, what are the UK targeting campaign sites you're trying for conversions and what products that are driving conversions for and so on. So it all boils down to the taxonomy. And this would actually be an example of a taxonomy why we have the locale, we have the business unit, the category and the actual product and the end here. Nice to separate it with underscores and lowercase and all these things. The others many ways. I mean, these are just some examples. I mean, through our clients, I mean, it's it could be anything, but it caters to the business, right? It could be you want to track the targeted devices, you want to have the search type, you have strategies you have, I mean, campaign objectives, which is actually a quite interesting one to have in mind here. Having the campaign objective in the campaign tracking really tells you about something about your messaging, and again, the targeting that we're running here, if I'm running I mean our conversion targets campaign and want to drive conversions, but you can see we only have product use or something from our tracking. It's probably more of an awareness or a top follow campaign that stub resolver actually was set up to drive conversions well, then that's definitely something I mean, we need to change about the creative or the messaging or something like that, because we don't reach our actual talk objective with the company. And there's many other possibilities. As you can see when we have a fully functional tracking structure here, so this is actually taken from from our s close to one of our real life examples that we have here. And it's the same similar concept as Andy shared before for the use in cycling, there's just a bit more information in here. If you look at the thing at the bottom, the source is Facebook's is actually the social campaign driving traffic from Facebook, the medium is social paid. So in this case here, we actually split social up into different buckets, social unmaintained version and the well organic, but this is the paid part. And then we have UTM campaign that consists of I mean, a bit more values than we saw before. So we have the country, the language, actually have a campaign type here. So it's prospecting. We also have a conversion CNV. So that's the objective, we have the business unit, the category, the product, we will have a launch date here, January 22, or 20, January in 2022. And the name is called product launch. So there's many elements in this string here that we can actually start reporting on. We also have a few lock parameters, contents, and so on and it, but it just means that when you go into the campaign report, I mean, if you go into the acquisition on the left hand side and say all campaigns, you're likely to see a very nice structured campaign view looking like this. And again, you can see it follows the same convention. I mean, there's number of underscores the number of elements and all that which allows you to quite easily actually search by the mean individual elements and have them grouped together and see those aggregated numbers of your competitors. One thing I would like to stress here is to channel definitions. I mean, it's, we've seen so many times here that a business has tried to cater for standard and default channel groupings instead of updating channel groupings to reach the business. I mean, no business is the same, you will need to update these to match them to match your needs in order to drive and get most value out of it. Some businesses, I mean, in this example, here, are fine with tracking social, a social, I mean, they don't spend on paid on organic, you don't have to do it, but it actually drives quite a good insights in doing so. And if you go into the channel groups, and you can actually update the existing social channel definition. Instead of just having the system defined once you can say, well, the medium exactly matches social payments, or matches social organic. So in this way, here, we actually have two different return return values, the paid and organic part. So we have a split on the paid versus organic, but we're grouping both of them into one social channel, which gives you an aggregated view as well, which you can nicely split out on these things. It's quite interesting to see the impact of your paid versus the organic, how you can, I mean, there's two ways you can actually buy more organic content, you can optimize the value that you're getting out from your paid activities. And the other way around, the more paid to do perhaps the more brand managers reading, you can actually move that to be organic partners and save some cost. I mean, there's some interesting ways that these things here play around the same thing with I mean, organic keywords versus I mean, paid keywords, you can, if you have a lot of traffic on pay keywords will start creating content for that get the ranking up in the organic process and budgets move users so two gigantic traffic sources that you can do the same thing with offline, we're seeing a growing example of I think, I mean, during COVID QR codes exploded. I mean, that's so mean. And I want to do that. Andy Crestodina 33:42 That's a great use case. Is QR codes. Yeah, perfect, right, because you can add campaign tracking code to that link, Kasper Rasmussen 33:49 ad campaign tracking code. So I have quite a quite an interesting case. Here, we have a very large pump manufacturer, they actually putting QR codes on individual products for user manuals. So when they use I mean, the scanner, I mean out in the field, and they can actually see what specific product was scanned. Now which product manual were read. And when they I mean, in the world was a scan. I mean, it was set up with a client with the business, and all these things here. So there's many interesting ways that you can do it. I mean, QR, again, it's, it's like a religion, there's no nothing is carved in stone, you could say it's an offline channel. And then the source could be a QR or the delivery type could be cured by the source could be a flyer that you're running, channeled the offline still many ways you can slice and dice, but it's going to be quite interesting to have everything grouped into these channels here instead. I mean, because if you don't create these channels here, you'll just see everything in and up in direct that hasn't been defined, defined. Andy Crestodina 34:42 So you're in analytics, the admin section, under Channel Settings, and you're making you're redefining what channels are. So you could literally make a channel for offline Kasper Rasmussen 34:52 can make a channel for offline. So I mean, if you're running a billboard, that's not I mean, you're gonna have a short URL for instance. Yeah. Small piddly ones, and all that they can redirect to your actual destination and your UTM medium could just be offline, all that offline activities. And it's so cool suddenly tracking your digital, Andy Crestodina 35:10 you'd never started that seemed to redefine the channel definitions, excellent and create a new one for offline, that could be like QR codes, because honestly, like, let's say, let's say you're just a single business unit, and you're, you know, or your small restaurant group, you got a lot of random traffic to your to your site, that's not marketing at all, it's people looking at the cocktail menu. You don't want that in your analytics, you want to be able to see it separately. And without a campaign tracking code, it's all mixed in, right? Those are all like direct traffic visitors. Kasper Rasmussen 35:41 Exactly. And that's actually a very good example. Because, I mean, campaign tracking can use as a nice grouping for you to report on the data. But you can also exclude the data from your report, use I mean, segments and all that. So everything that you don't want to have in your, your marketing reports, I mean, again, looking at the manual scanning and going in, we'll leave it out, focus on everything else, right, Andy Crestodina 36:00 exclude it, you don't want it. It's not marketing data. It's current customer data. But next time I met a little probably later today, next time, I scan a QR code and look at a menu and, and land on a landing page. I'll be looking to see if his campaign tracking code, and I'm gonna think of you Kaspar, when I noticed how bad these places are at tracking there are segmenting their visitors, which is really what we're talking about, right? To exclude the people sitting in the restaurant from, you know, visitors who are, you know, you know, not yet in, you know, sitting down, potential potential diners Kasper Rasmussen 36:36 excited. Yeah, that's actually honestly, so many of us gets fired when we insecurities, we make them dynamic as well. So if you have a friend that showed up, you can redirect to mean have a QR code redirect into one of your own shortcuts, redirect into the full one, you can always change the redirect from the shoulder will mean that you can suddenly change the destination of a QR code without changing the QR code itself. A very good use case for that is sending your story going into a grocery store. And you can I mean, you can subscribe to your newsletter, for instance, or you can open the current week's newspaper. When you scan that QR code, you're taken to the newspaper online, I mean, the digital newspaper for that one, with a tracking code on as well. Of course, well, the next week, instead of changing the QR code, you just update the shortcodes pointing to the new array newspaper with the new tracking codes, you know, printing? Andy Crestodina 37:20 Exactly. Yep, you don't need to go reprint it again. You You know, the word that pops to mind a lot during these conversations is governance. This is like link management campaign tracking its type of governance almost right. It's like just being organized about how you do things. It is what is the name of what we're talking about. Kasper Rasmussen 37:42 I think it's I mean, data governance, or its standardization as well. That it's a combination of of governance and towards I mean, a process is a flow. It's a hygiene. I mean, there's so many Andy Crestodina 37:55 hygiene. Yeah, it's totally hygiene, it's because it's cleaning up your data. Yeah, it's it's um it's marketing, data hygiene, its favorite marketing, metric hygiene. Kasper Rasmussen 38:05 I like that too. Exactly. And, I mean, there's so much to because if you have this good hygiene, I mean, if you take the social part, you actually, I mean, you're consistent in tracking your paid activities using the right medium, social paid. And all the I mean, the social load all the organic posts that you're tracking as well, we'll use the medium, social, organic, I mean, then you have the nice split, right, you have to aggregate and under the shoshan, easily add a secondary dimension for the source video and breakdown. Well, then suddenly, you have everything's been out on the organic versus to pay part, you can see how those two drive conversions. You can add your mean the revenue and everything, the bounce rate and small old inserting metrics and these ones here. Andy Crestodina 38:43 I think hygiene is a good word, because it's what's the opposite of hygiene. Your data is not clean. It's your data is polluted, or it's diluted. Yeah, it makes the case. Exactly. Dirty data. Kasper Rasmussen 38:56 And then that's the trust, I would say. I mean, trust is a big thing. Right? Definitely. I mean, we need to trust the data. I mean, trust is a fundamental fundamental thing, because we can I mean, create any reports we're like, here, we can make any conclusions. But if you don't trust the underlying data here, I mean, what is it worth Right, right? And then we if we want to take it, I mean tickets to the full full extent here. I mean, that's, we have UTM source UTM, medium UTM campaign UTM content, UTM term, active UTM ID as well. Those are the six default UTM parameters that we have from Google source media are fairly locked down to will the source where we use a classic medium well beyond the category of the source, essentially, paying continent term are for graphs. I mean, you can use that for anything that you would like. It's only the campaign report that is natively available as a dedicated report in GA if I'm not mistaken. I'm pretty sure that the concept which is called Atkinson, in the dimensions and term is called keyword aren't available as secondary breakdowns but can always do custom reports in GA if you want to left, you can use it for anything you'd like, even though it's called UTM term, you don't have to use for keywords, you can use it for anything. You'd say mid is another LINE ID that is used for data enrichment, data imports, come back to that. But then you can do anything. I mean, you could have something called UTM segment, you can have anything called UTM, macro, Utah, I mean, ginger, you probably want to stay away from that. And sounds like dirty key, Andy Crestodina 40:23 you're inventing those, you're creating your own parameters. Kasper Rasmussen 40:27 So these are just trusted parameter, I'm just making them up here. But you don't even have to prefix them with UTM. That doesn't really matter here. But the concept is, if you want to separate some data out, I mean, have them in a in a separate dimension in GA, for instance, we could easily just add them as our separate parameter. And then if you're using a Tag Manager, like Google Tag Manager, for instance, well, you can just take you 10 second parameter, take the value, and put that into one of your custom dimensions in GA, and then you have during the map in here, so suddenly, you can actually track up and take our campaigns using the normal tracking parameters, we can add our own, it could be that we want to have a segment, for instance, apply to that. And we can have that in the dimension that we can choose to apply to any of our traffic within GA seats on Andy Crestodina 41:11 Britain. So if you make up your own parameters, you also have to set up custom dimensions for them to appear as reports in GA. Kasper Rasmussen 41:17 Yes, it might be that you can do something with filters within GA. But I think the most common case here would be within your Tag Manager to pack that into a damage report. Yeah, it makes sense. And then I mean, at the bottom of the screen, you can see lots of IDs here that mount I mean, don't get scared away from that one. It's actually it's fairly simple. So what you see here is the macro part that equals some curly brackets, and some IDs and so on. This is actually macros that are recognized by Facebook. So if you want to get really advanced here, you can have Facebook, I mean, automatically insert the column corresponding campaign IDs, the ad space and the ad IDs into destination Euro. It's very interesting, because you can capture this in that dimension as well. And then start importing, I mean, you can see here, it's a macro, we have to appear as a separate dimension. And then you can start informing the corresponding app names into GA. So now we are getting a bit more advanced here. But you can actually recreate the hierarchy from immediate platform analytics. And why would you Why do you want to do that? Well, first of all, the marketing team would love it. Because the I mean, the the normally would send tracking is more for analysts going very broad across two channels and sources, financial markets here would like to see it was this specific campaign, this specific AdSense campaign that drove the traffic in here. The other thing is, you also need to think about attribution windows here, GA license up goes across everything. Facebook, real logona looks at Facebook's touch points in here, which might be biased to watch Facebook, same thing for Google. I mean, Google ads, campaign manager, anything that has their own tracking pixels, because they can only take into account their own touch points. So we want to have this into in GA for this one. So how to succeed. I mean, it's a that's lots to lots of focus on here. For sure. I mean, found this funny example here. The rhyming, that's many ways to spell Philadelphia. Same thing for anything else newsletter, with one T two T triple T's I guess, I mean, Facebook, capital F, lowercase F. Thing is, if you don't have a consistent way to do it, if you don't have a good, good process for our hygiene in order to to create these codes here, we will end up with many different ways to spell our campaigns use taxonomy and so on, needs to be processed in place, most often people are going into a spreadsheet or Google Sheet and creating these schemas for doing the drop down. So ensure that everybody's on the same way. But I would say if you're in a growing organization, large organization, you may want to consider other means, especially if you're working with multiple markets and different stakeholders internally, externally. You may see limitations with spreadsheets. Then we can have a spot for sure, of course, but just consider doing a best I mean, best fit solution for the situation that you're in. So people know that I mean, you want to spend time on reporting and optimizing and enjoying our conversions, not cleaning data. That's for sure. Yes, sir. Excellent. Thank you. Kate Vostokova 44:21 Andy. Kasper, I just wondering that we won't have enough time for questions. And actually, we already started to get questions. What do you think? How should we proceed? We plan to have a short quiz now. Should we move to eight and then we go to questions or Andy Crestodina 44:38 yeah, maybe I mean, it sounds like the quizzes are like lightning round very quick. We've got 15 minutes I think right. So Kate Vostokova 44:45 yeah, okay, let's do like very, very fast. First, I want to send the price that yeah, that we will have maybe Andy you can add a couple of words about the book like who would benefit for reading so this will include Which people to win it. And in the meantime, I'll prepare the rest. Andy Crestodina 45:04 So Jay Baer called this the most practical book ever written about content marketing. If you read the Amazon reviews, you'll see the word Bible used a lot. I think that's an overstatement. But it is literally it's a mostly complete handbook for anything that you need to do due to content marketing. It is everything, it's everything I've learned over 15 years, and 200 pages, and it's filled with with graphics and diagrams and images. It's a reference guide. I have a lot of friends and a lot of influencers who say they keep it on their desk. So it is it's, it's, you're gonna get 1000s of hours of my experiments and learning and best practices. Between two covers, so highly recommended. Kate Vostokova 45:50 Great. Okay, so the rules are easy. I'm sending the link to this tool that we use, which called mint.com. I'm sharing the screen. Do you see it? Yep. Great. I actually also planned to play I want, I want to answer the correct answers. I want to use the Korean pencils. I know all of them. But yeah, I just like to play as well. Okay. Okay, let's see what we have. Here. I'm ready. It's wait for football for more people. I just see two. Guys, let's join. Let's join us here. It's really easy. Just take your phones. Go through this link. Put your name and your age to play. Kasper Rasmussen 46:42 I'm doing to Medicare for Christmas when they actually have the app here. Kate Vostokova 46:46 Guys, can you talk with let me know if you're in? Oh, I see. I see more people joining. Okay, so maybe you just have some troubles joining. Just wondering that's Andy Crestodina 46:58 cute till Kate Vostokova 47:00 I actually didn't know that he looks like these different. Just the people when they join. Because when we when we tested it wasn't like that. Okay, we have a strawberry a dog had. Nice. Okay, let's, yeah, let's start. Okay, the last one the plane. Okay, who's not in? I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. Cool. Let's start because we don't have much time. So I'm starting to come down. And it's just like questions really easy to answer. If you listen carefully to a presentation, it will be super easy for you. So the first one is what percentage of employers report that people with analytic skills are hard to find? Just remember what MD presented and you will, you will know the answer. Okay, hands up. Great. Two people up. Let's move to the next one. Though, the next question is which of the following is not a default channel grouping in Google Analytics? Within organic search, direct social brand, or URL? One mentioned it on the slide. So you'll it will be easy I think to answer as well. Five, four. signs up. And do we have the right question? Yes. Unknown Speaker 48:34 Smart Group. Kate Vostokova 48:36 Yeah. Let's move on to the next one. What are the following was mentioned as an issue for identifying traffic sources. So here are three issues you can choose. Or maybe it's all of them do have a right. Yeah. Yeah. It's my job. And I think this is four or five. Which of the following is used for the broadest origin of traffic? It's one is easy or easy to answer? And the last one, and the last chance so now we will know the winner after this question. Which of these metrics are not found in Google Analytics? average time on page shares bounce rate or conversion rate. And We will soon know the winner. Okay. Oh, Andy wasn't answering okay. Andy Crestodina 50:13 Oh, we have a winner. Now we have a Kate Vostokova 50:15 winner. It's a Mosin Shah. I don't know if I can answer correctly, sorry, but you are the winner and the book is yours congrats, I will contact you to check how I can deliver it to you. Congratulations. Andy Crestodina 50:33 Most, then you are getting a LinkedIn connection request for me right now to congratulate you. Kate Vostokova 50:40 Okay, so let's maybe move to the questions because we just have like, 10 minutes left. And guys, if you want to ask a question live, maybe it requires a lot of context, and you don't want to write it. So just raise your hand. And I will turn on your microphone. So we can ask the question. And used to the first question, Andy Crestodina 51:02 it's, I do, this is the best way to build these reports in Google Analytics for so I have, I'm going to share a screen, I took a minute to record. So here's a little screencast video of me creating a campaign report in GFR. So it's under the Reports. It's under acquisition. And it's under traffic acquisition. Of course, notice there's very few reports in here. So we need to build this report ourselves. So the next thing I'm going to do is to customize this report to choose the metrics that I find most useful. I'm going to just choose sessions as in visits, the engagement rate, which is the new version of bounce rate, a bit different, a higher numbers better for engagement rate, and conversion. So I print, I'm prioritizing those three metrics, and literally customizing my report to put those three columns at the beginning of the report, it's gonna go back, you're gonna see those the three first columns session engagement rate and conversions. Now, my primary dimension here, I want to switch to the campaign dimension. Now I can see all kinds of campaigns, but you saw there was some noise in there, organic and direct and other things. So I'm going to create a comparison, which is the new version of filters to exclude those. So which which dimensions am I doing for the exclude the campaign, which ones may excluding this is actually kind of handy, I'm just going to check the boxes to exclude them. And now I have removed those, there's still a comparison. So I need to take out the all users. And now as you scroll down here, you can see, these are my this is sort of the closest thing to a campaign report. It's got the campaign as the primary dimension, sessions, engagements and conversions as the three main main metrics. A little bit more work. Not that I had to use. I had to customize a report, I had to use a comparison for the report, I had to change the primary dimension, because there's not one called campaign as a default report. But that tiny video and yes, we'll share it, it's the last slide in my deck will share everything. That is how to create a report to view the performance of campaigns in GA four. Kasper Rasmussen 53:04 And then the studies to see for campaign here, are those tracked using normal YouTube promos? Or do we need to change anything? Andy Crestodina 53:10 Nope, those are the those are just the campaign parameters. That's the the first column there is the UTM campaign equals. Kasper Rasmussen 53:17 So you can compare from IRS I mean, regardless, we'll be going into I mean, full Universe Analytics are going into GA for you don't need to change your check tagging, essentially, for the activities here, they will just flow. Andy Crestodina 53:27 No, it's the same, I could even with that little blue plus, I could click that and add a secondary dimension for source medium, and it would pull the source medium from the campaign parameters. That's it, there you go. But a bit more custom, a bit more involved a few more clicks. And here again, this is going to make each review more valuable. If you're early on the curve. If you're an early adopter for GA four, you're going to have this kind of secret knowledge. This is the level of the report, it's a bit more of a Pro Tool. And and so it's going to create a bigger gap between you know, the less the less senior marketers and people like us who know how to go in, make those exact clicks to get this exact data to go to that meeting and and give useful input. Yeah, fun, right. I wonder what people think of that, like, that's what it takes. That's the tool. That's what we're doing now. Welcome to the future. Starting next July. That's how you have to do it. Kasper Rasmussen 54:29 This is pretty crazy that you notice and this is gonna be sunset here. I mean, that's how a lot of companies that are working very, very hard to make that transition. Kate Vostokova 54:39 I think many people think that okay, it's next July. I still have time to get used to this. You know, maybe in June, June I will start Andy Crestodina 54:48 How long did it take you to learn GE universal more than a year. That means now's the time to start using gap learning GA for it's, it's it's um It's going to be just prepared to be frustrated for a while. And but keep going, you'll get it. Kasper Rasmussen 55:08 Exactly. And also think I mean, even though that's a second power, right? And then if you're going back to campaign tracking here, I mean, there's much more to it than just reporting. I mean, there's all the process, the fundamental, it's the sign of taxonomy structure, aligning with people, and it was stakeholders. I mean, there's actually quite a few tasks involved in getting this nailed across a team that I mean, more than five people talk with, I mean, what would your search team what do they need for reporting? I mean, there might be similarities with the display team, the social team, but I'll probably guarantee that they're not 100% identical, and how to align that in a structure that goes across. I mean, it takes some time to do and it's never too late. Andy Crestodina 55:49 It's never too late. But bottom line, we're using analytics there to answer questions. It's not just for reporting, we're trying to do analysis, this sort of two uses for analytics, generally. One is to just run reports, sometimes, you know, certain executives like reports. But that's not the same as making more informed decisions using accurate marketing data. So there's a big difference between just reporting and doing analysis. Lots of marketers can do basic reporting. It's far more valuable than marketers that are good at doing analysis and making recommendations and creating executive summaries and going to the level of like, these are our current hypotheses. This is what worked, what didn't work. Reports are kind of boring. Analysis is fun. Kasper Rasmussen 56:32 That's where I see the insights. Right? I mean, the changes and the impacts you can actually do and things. Yeah, so that's completely agree. Andy Crestodina 56:38 Yep. Anybody can report. Thank you for your question, Kate. Kate Vostokova 56:48 Oh, it wasn't actually carried, you know, because some people just got into using my link. Oh, this person just commented, yeah. Just demented in the in the chat that. She has been. Oh, he I don't know. Been following you since since content marketing course last last year. So yeah, it's Jade. Yeah, it's Jake's right. Now we no money. Okay, any more questions to our experts? Or we will finish on time? I don't know which we don't have any? Andy Crestodina 57:27 Well, I think that there's just a general question that we can all ask. Now, the next time you're in a meeting is like, did that work? And then someone's gonna give you an answer. And then ask How confident are you in your in the data? And when you go one level deeper, and look more closely at this specific effort? You know, what was the art? And what was the I? What was the return in the and what was the investment? If you don't ask the questions that find those answers, then you are at high risk of spending lots of hours with zero value. It's the problem with marketing, there's so many things you can do. So many things can be categorized as marketing, but which are the things that actually make a big difference? It's the 8020 rule, taken to the extreme, it's the 95, five rule 95% of your results may be coming from 5% of your efforts. The job of analytics is to help us find those unicorns so we can double down on those efforts. Kate Vostokova 58:23 Exactly. Question sorry. Yeah, in the chat, is it necessary to shorten your links? Or can you use just them as these? Kasper Rasmussen 58:34 Well, I mean, your turn, if you put UTM parameters in your links that will drive traffic to your website, you can use them as mean that they can be long you can I mean, of course, the exposing everything. If you're using them in an offline setting, or a text message or anything where the link is visible, I will always recommend that you show them something else. I mean, otherwise people will not know where to go to, and it will probably you need to pay for full text messages to send that in the full length in a text message. So shortening is definitely if you don't want to have to take up as much space. And that's probably the only reason for doing so. Bear in mind, I actually got a got a question the other day that they want to show them a client want to show them the yields, because they don't want to expose the parameters to the angels. The thing is your gels, it's just a redirect. Right. So it's taken to the full URL anyway with default parameters on them, so they can always see what's in there. Andy Crestodina 59:31 So I thought of that when I when you mentioned UTM objective. If the visitor it's very unlikely, who looks at those campaign params who looks at parameters, but if the you but if the UTM objective has something in it that's meaningful, like trying to reengage these people, Kasper Rasmussen 59:49 shoppers, non converters and Andy Crestodina 59:52 people who've been ignoring me like he wouldn't put those as your parameters. Kasper Rasmussen 59:55 Exactly. And that's actually that we didn't get into today. It's A full full session on that alone. But the I would say logic combination clients always using IDs instead. So instead of having all values put into many parameters just using a single campaign ID, and then you have some sort of means like a tool that you're going into or something else that imports all the values. So let's X and linking it with this ID here. So the users will just see like six characters, alphanumeric characters doesn't mean anything. But all your costs will be the same, because the data goes through an API behind the scenes. But that's definitely the next level. Kate Vostokova 1:00:30 Sorry, I know we have to finish because it's already a pm. I think you have some main calls, things to do. But we have the last one more question in the in the chat in the q&a section. Can you please take it? And sure. Andy Crestodina 1:00:46 I don't see the question, though. Kate Vostokova 1:00:47 Oh, sorry. Okay, I love to read it, then. How long does it take to start seeing results for content piece is like, whoa, or the month months? Good timeframe? Andy Crestodina 1:00:58 That's such a fun question. Oh, well, because it would depend on the traffic source. So there are things that you can do with it. If you publicly publish a piece of content, and then promote it with an email, you will see traffic starting within minutes, that traffic may last for a day and a half or two days, with some small tail lagging for for some days and weeks. If you take a few creative piece of content and promote it in social media, all the traffic that comes from that social post will likely come in the first few hours, as the streams show that at the top, and then that will taper off over the next few days. Usually, if you create a piece of content that's optimized for search, it may get crawled and indexed within a day. But it may not rank I just saw a piece of content that I published, it's optimized for like how to grant access to Google Analytics. It was two years before that thing started to rank. Now it ranks number two, right under Google, it's attracted 10,000 visitors over time. But search is a much slower channel, you might see links to it, keep up keep editing it keep optimizing it. So the amount of the the interval at which you begin to report on the success of a piece of content will definitely depend on the channels in which that content was promoted. YouTube videos get discovered, as suggested through YouTube suggest, when does that kick in? That can take a lot of time before YouTube concludes that this is a page that this is a video that gets engagement. So it's a I think it depends upon the traffic source. But generally speaking, a week after a piece of content is live, you should have good insights into what how well, it worked. Behavior metrics, you'll get right away, regardless of the traffic source. They won't vary too much debate or behavior metrics, won't one vary too much time on page conversion rate pages per visit. So those you can start to report on, you know, as soon as you start to get visitors. Everything is cheese, and everything is mousetrap. Did it attract visitors? Yes or no? That's the cheese did it engage and convert visitors yesterday. Now that's the mousetrap. Every piece of content succeeds or fails against those two general categories. And but they have different reporting different ways in which to report on them. Kate Vostokova 1:03:11 Okay, so maybe, let's wrap up because we're out of time, and I see that people started to leave probably they also have some things to do. Thank you so much for spending this hour with us and Casper, thank you for your time for your insights or knowledge. The recording will be sent tomorrow, so please just want to rewatch it or send or share with some friends. I don't know. Yeah. Thanks, everyone, and have a nice day. See you next Thursday. Next Thursday. We'll talk about international SEO, one of the hottest topics in marketing and content marketing. So do join us next Thursday. Same time. Same link actually. Thanks. Thanks, Kate. Good. Kasper Rasmussen 1:03:55 Jasper was a pleasure was finally like it