Are your web experiences meeting the needs of users coming from your marketing campaigns? Typically, we create a path for users from campaigns very deliberately. Additionally, marketers and communicators have been utilizing campaign tagging to track inbound traffic from their channels. This practice makes it relatively easy to see the impact of campaigns on your downstream goals.
To learn how to utilize these tools, consider the following scenario:
You've built in a web experience for potential donors. Your objective is for users to click a button taking them to the iGive form to finalize your donation. Your team has designed a multichannel campaign using social media and email to drive users to the web experience using tracked URLs that follow the naming standards for the University. The campaign name includes the words "umar" and "donor."
Your hypothesis is that users from those campaigns will be more likely to donate than other visitors because they have (a) been exposed to key messages through your campaign and (b) visited pages that you designed for them to improve their experience by offering key information and removing barriers and obstacles to completing the donation. To improve future campaigns, you’d also like to understand what parts of your multichannel campaign contributed to the most online donations.
How many people came to my site because of the campaign?
- Go to page 2 of the General Website Dashboard
- Narrow your date range to the timeframe of your campaign.
- Using the "Campaign" filter, search for your campaigns and select all that apply from your unit.
The statement below the Campaign filter will give you basic traffic information including users, site sessions and total unique pageviews generated from your campaign based on your filter selections.
To compare this to overall traffic to your site at the same time, remove the “Campaign” filter and select the hostname/subdomain where your giving experience lives from the top right filter. Compare your campaign traffic to your overall site traffic to understand what percentage of your visitors were campaign-based.
For a quick and dirty view of your contributing channels, use the data on the left-hand site to view traffic by different mediums, such as social media, email, or print.
To view online gifts, scroll down to the online giving goal section to see conversion rates and gifts. As a reminder, viewing conversion outcomes requires that the Global Container has been installed on your site.
What parts of your multichannel campaign contributed to the most online donations?
If you want to move beyond the quick and dirty view in the General Website Dashboard, open up Google Analytics for more information.
- Go to Google Analytics and select the property most relevant to your campaign. In the giving scenario, the most appropriate would be 01 – Academics, Research, Students and Alumni Services.
- Narrow your date range to the timeframe of your campaign.
- Go to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns and find your campaign name in the data table or search for your campaign.
PRO TIP: If you are using the university guidelines on tagging, you can quickly find all of your campaigns by putting your unit code into the search box.
- Click on the campaign name to pull up data for your campaign.
- The default view after the click is “Source/Medium.”
PRO TIP: Your UTM tags influence where your campaigns end up in these buckets. By following the source/medium guidelines, your work will end up in the correct buckets.
- For further detail, toggle the “Primary Dimension” to review.
- Example: For emails with multiple link options, choose “landing page”
- Example: For social, choose “source” to view different platforms
- Example: for (other), choose “medium” to view different offline things like radio, television or print
If you do not have access to the Roll Up or Child Properties in Google Analytics, please email websupport@osu.edu.
Were users from my campaign more likely to become a donor than regular site visitors?
To answer this question, you want to compare conversion rates for each audience. A conversion rate is simply the percentage of visitors that completed an action. To compare audiences, you will need to create two custom segments.
- In Google Analytics, under the “Audience” menu, select “Overview”
- Above the charts, you’ll see a box that says, “All Users” and a box that says, “Add Segment”
- Click on “+ New Segment”
- Your first segment is going to be all users who visited your site. Name the segment appropriately. Then select “Conditions” from the menu at the near left.
- Change the Filter from “Sessions” to “Users
- Select “Hostname” and enter your hostname. You can add multiple by selecting “Or” or you can use a regular expression statement to add multiple at once.
- Use the “Summary” data at the right to see the volume of users and sessions that meet your conditions.
- Save your segment.
- Click on “+ New Segment” again
- Your second segment is going to be all users who visited from your campaign. Name the segment appropriately. Then select “Conditions” from the menu at the near left.
- Change the Filter from “Sessions” to “Users
- Select “Campaign” and enter your campaign name. You can add multiple by selecting “Or” or you can use a regular expression statement to add multiple at once.
- Use the “Summary” data at the right to see the volume of users and sessions that meet your conditions.
- Save your segment.
- After you’ve created both segments, choose them from the segment list. (Your view of Google Analytics has now been filtered to consider only the users in each of your segments and you can view comparisons in all reports within the interface.)
- To compare online gift conversion rates and total gifts made, go to “Acquisition” > “All Traffic” > “Channels” and review the data table to your left.
- At the summary level, you can compare all the normal metrics for acquisition.
- Select “Online Gift Complete” from the “Conversions” menu to view conversion rates and total gifts. Keep in mind that your campaign users are likely a subset of your Host users if your campaign sent users to your host.
Are rates better for campaign visitors? Using the sample data above, yes, users from our giving campaign were more likely to convert because their conversion rate was 0.15% versus the normal rate of 0.04%. Conversion rate is calculated by looking at the number of gifts made divided by the number of sessions.
If yes, then your hypothesis is true. If not, go back to the drawing board. But remember - you can optimize all sides of any campaign. There are many ways to improve conversion rates, ranging from improving inbound traffic to key pages where conversion actions sit to robust testing and optimization of landing pages or site pages that contain your calls-to-action for many of these goals. Or, in some cases, it could be as simple as adding the right call-to-action on a page where you expect people to convert that doesn't have one today.
Keep in mind that the segment is for users which means that at any time during your designated time-period, the users came to the site from your campaign. However, they could have had visited the site from other sources during the time-period as well. In this case, the most recent channel would be reflected. If you are trying to understand the total traffic generated via clicks for your campaign, this is NOT the best report to do so. Go back to the previous section for further information.
Is this too much clicking around the interface? Don’t want to wait until after the campaign to review?
Consider building a Data Studio dashboard for campaigns prior to launch to encourage in-flight monitoring. You can apply custom segments to individual pages in Data Studio reports to make viewing multiple options easier!
BONUS: What is the best way to look at my advertising click information and my website traffic?
To answer this question, you will want to look at a few variables from your advertising platforms plus traffic on Google Analytics.
First, you will need the cost, impression and link click data from your advertising partner, broken down by however your UTM tags were created. For example, let’s say you used the Facebook advertising platform to buy space on Facebook and Instagram for a single campaign. The only thing different about your UTM codes were the source of Facebook or Instagram. Therefore, you want to pull your costs, impressions and link clicks for Instagram and costs, impressions, and link clicks for Facebook.
Second, go to Google Analytics and open the Acquisition > Campaigns report. Find your campaign (or campaigns) by typing in the first part of the name in the search bar at the top right of the data table. Select the appropriate conversion goal if you had one for your campaign. Then review the results by channel.
Sessions will be the number to correlate with clicks from your advertising campaign. Note that display and paid social campaigns tend to show much higher click values on ads than resulting web traffic. We’ve seen up to 40% differentials between link clicks recorded in advertising platforms and sessions on the web. This is due to drop-offs and inadvertent clicks on your ads.
The sample data below is for a patient engagement campaign and shows the paid channels by their source and medium. In this case, you can see major differences in resulting downstream goals for Google Search ads versus Facebook paid ads. Thus, direct conversion rates for paid search are double that of paid social.
PRO TIP: Google conversion rates are based on last-click attribution. This means that the last ad a user clicked on prior to converting gets credit. What that doesn’t tell you is whether they were exposed to multiple points of your campaign. Many times, you design a multi-channel campaign in such a way that you increase frequency of touchpoints for a single person by utilizing multiple channels. To view conversions for all visits to the website for people exposed at any point to the campaign, review the audience segment approach outlined above.
Related Resources
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.
To start tagging quickly, use our interactive URL builder.
To get familiar with all the in's and out's and options, explore more details on the university standards, including examples.
Need to send our requirements to a supplier? Download our supplier worksheet.
To learn more about common marketing audiences, objectives and more on digital milestones and key web properties, check our resources on our Audience Experience Analytics page.
To get a detailed list of goals set up in the Main Reporting View of Roll Up Property and how they are triggered across the domain, click for more on our GA Configuration resource.