Office of Marketing and Communications

Measuring Marketing Activity

The marketing and communications community at Ohio State uses a common set of business practices and tools to ensure you can evaluate marketing activity performance.

Preferred Marketing Platforms

The central Marketing Analytics team is working to develop shared measurement dashboards for common marketing channels. Using one of these platforms ensures that you can appropriately measure and track your performance and gain access to the most support from the enterprise community.

Email and Marketing Automation Tools | BBIS, Salesforce Marketing, IBM Watson/Acoustic, Mail Chimp

Social Media Publishing and Management Tool | Sprout Social

Ad Buying Platform | Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager

Web Analytics | Google Analytics 360

Tag Management | Google Tag Manager 360

NOTE

If working through a media agency for ad buying, please review our Standards for Working with Agency Partners below.

Standards for Working with Agency Partners

Ensure your partners are providing you with the appropriate plan information, utilizing our tagging standards and providing data back to us to support transparency in your relationships and understand their work in your larger context.

Download Standards (PDF)

Help vendors understand our expectations and requirements for media planning, buying and measuring performance.

Download Marketing Technology Requirements (PDF)

Help vendors gain access to Ohio State marketing technology to deliver and measure advertising campaigns.

Download Reporting Template (CSV)

Media vendors are required to provide data on your campaigns. This worksheet gives them a standard format to deliver that data.

Download Campaign Tagging Worksheet for Vendor (XLS)

Media vendors are required to tag your campaigns using Ohio State standards. This worksheet will guide them through those standards to ensure accuracy.

Campaign Tagging Standards

We've established a common tagging protocol for the university — and developed the resources below to save you time. Ensure marketing tactics sending traffic to osu.edu sites have appropriate tags appended to URLs to support downstream evaluation of that tactic's capabilities in driving on-site behaviors. These tags can also be used in the personalization of web content for the tactic audience, support retargeting efforts and drive elements of centralized reporting. 

Web Analytics

Google Analytics 360 is the preferred tool for web and mobile app analytics at the institution. Our goal as an enterprise is to have a comprehensive view of users across osu.edu properties using our Google 360 organization.

  • Google Analytics Playbook
    View the Google Analytics Playbook for further information on how to utilize the goals and events in the GA360 property to analyze your web and campaign performance.
  • Google Tag Manager Installation Instructions
    To ensure that your site is tracked within the enterprise view, install the Google Tag Manager container. Benefits of this container include global management of privacy requirements, staying in compliance with OCIO security requirements and common measurement of events and goals.

Dashboarding Tools

Data visualization tools give us the ability to quickly identify patterns, trends and outliers within large data sets so that we can tell stories about performance.

Tableau

The official data visualization tool for The Ohio State University is Tableau.

Google Data Studio

Marketers across the enterprise utilize Google Data Studio for channel, website and campaign-level reporting. This tool is user friendly and allows you to connect directly to your Google products, including Analytics, Search Console and Sheets. Dashboards are real-time, filterable and easily shared with your stakeholders.

Request custom dashboard development or assistance by contacting adv-marketinganalytics@osu.edu.