Tracking Campaigns for Local Authorities Lucian Glenny Web Analyst
Overview 1. Creating a measurement plan 2. Identifying users from your campaign in Google Analytics 3. Analysing the pages viewed by campaign traffic 4. Enriching your page view data by tracking events 5. Measuring and reporting campaign results 6. Running campaigns on the Big Top platform
1 Creating a measurement plan
Creating a measurement plan It s important to decide, before you think about your traffic figures and your implementation, what you're trying to get out of your campaign. So, identify an objective early on. A measurement plan ensures that the vital questions are answered: Why are we running this campaign? How do we plan to achieve the campaign s objectives? What measurements can we make to quantify this?
Creating a measurement plan Campaign objective Goal 1 Goal 2 Measurable KPI Measurable KPI Measurable KPI Measurable KPI This is the Measurement Plan format which we recommend using. Lay out the objective of your campaign at the top, this could be to raise awareness of a recycling campaign for example. Then break this down into more digitally focused goals, which will directly contribute to helping you achieve your objective. Examples of campaign goals include distributing an informative PDF, or sending out information via email. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are metrics which can be measured online, making them a great way to establish how well your chosen goals are being met. Measurable KPI s could include the number of times a file was downloaded or the open rate from an email campaign.
2 Identifying users from your campaign in Google Analytics
Identifying users from your campaign in Google Analytics When running a marketing campaign, how can you view users who arrive from a campaign separately from the rest of the data? Paid Advertising Emails Social Media http://www.authority.gov.uk/landingpage/ By default, Google Analytics isn t set up to segment out traffic that arrives from a specific campaign. However, it is possible to set up your campaign in such a way that these users are tagged as coming from that particular campaign, through the use of UTM parameters.
Identifying users from your campaign in Google Analytics www.authority.gov.uk/landingpage/?utm_campaign=feb-awareness&utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=email There is a little amendment you can make when providing the link to your site, that ensures you can view and track users who have arrived from the campaign. By adding UTM parameters to your links, Google Analytics will add the data you specify to your user data. This means you can include information about the campaign, the source and the medium which has driven each user. Google Analytics will then automatically add this to the user data that it already has available on your site.
Identifying users from your campaign in Google Analytics Campaigns that use a landing page with UTM parameters can be reported on quickly and easily by using the source, medium, and campaign dimensions. After your campaign is up and running, you can then report on which source, medium and campaign drove the most traffic to your site. There are plenty of other metrics in Google Analytics which you might want or need to report on too, such as session duration or bounce rate.
Identifying users from your campaign in Google Analytics How does it work? When you provide your URL to the person viewing your campaign, you include the UTM parameters in the link shown to them When they click onto your site through the UTM tagged URL, Google automatically adds the chosen parameters to dimensions associated with that user This builds up a pool of users who are all tagged with the source, medium, and campaign dimension that you entered when creating your campaign Analysis can be performed on users who arrived from a specific campaign by creating a segment of only users who have your campaign name in the campaign dimension
3 Analysing the pages viewed by campaign traffic
Analysing the pages viewed by campaign traffic Paid Advertising Emails Social www.authority.gov.uk/landingpage/?utm_campaign=febawareness&utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=email What do they do now you ve brought them to your site?
Analysing the pages viewed by campaign traffic To analyse whether our campaign users are actually accessing the material intended for them, we can begin by analysing which pages they are viewing. A segment of these people can be created by entering a rule that only includes traffic which has a specific campaign name included in their Campaign dimension. Once you ve applied your chosen segments, you can then run any report on them. This is a really powerful tool because it allows you to only look at traffic which came from your campaign.
Analysing the pages viewed by campaign traffic Two useful tools for analysing the pathways that users take once they arrive: Segmented All Pages report This tool shows you the breakdown of pages on your site that were viewed and the number of people who viewed those pages, specifically from your campaign. This is handy for identifying which pages are being found by users from your campaign, and allows you to see if people are taking the time to engage with your most important pieces of content. You re then able to identify content on your site which may need more attention.
Analysing the pages viewed by campaign traffic Two useful tools for analysing the pathways that users take once they arrive: Segmented Navigation Summary This tool allows you to choose a particular page, and then see which pages people tended to navigate to next. This report can give you indication of whether people understand the messaging in your campaign. Did it draw in people who were actually interested? You will also be able to see if the navigation on your site is effective by identifying which users find the information that they re looking for.
4 Enriching your page view data by tracking events
Enriching your page view data by tracking events What if there are important user interactions that can t be measured by page views alone? By implementing event tracking in Google Analytics, you can measure: Downloads Clicks on buttons Videos watched Usage of site tools Web form submissions An event tracking tag is a piece of code added to certain pages which sends data into Google Analytics when a particular action is performed.
Enriching your page view data by tracking events Event tracking can be set up more easily by installing Google Tag Manager on your site, setting up triggers corresponding to certain actions, and using these triggers to send event data into your Google Analytics property. This data gets added to a user s session information, so that you can view which interactions the user had, and which pages they occurred on. User action on website GTM trigger activates based on definition that you write Trigger fires a tag which sends the event data into GA GTM also offers many other benefits, such as the ability to reuse triggers and preview tags before they are fully set up.
Enriching your page view data by tracking events Once these event tags are set up, you can report on how many users from your campaign completed your various events.
5 Measuring and reporting campaign results
Measuring and reporting campaign results Think back to the measurement plan : Campaign objective Goal 1 Goal 2 Measurable KPI Measurable KPI Measurable KPI Measurable KPI To be ready to measure the success of our campaign, we need to include a measure of each KPI in our analytics data. This can be achieved by defining each of these measures as a goal in Google Analytics. Goals can be set up to measure the completion of events, users visiting key pages, or users reaching a benchmark of time spent on the site or number of pages viewed.
Measuring and reporting campaign results How do goals work? You need to define a rule, which acts as a condition which some users will satisfy and other users won t. Once this rule is set up, you then can report on how many times and by whom your goal was completed. For example: defining a goal for a KPI based on the number of users reaching a thank you page after submitting a form: URL = http://abc.com/thanks Reporting
Measuring and reporting campaign results When you define goals, you gain the ability to report on key stats for analysing how successful your website and marketing campaigns are: Goal completions Either of these stats may be chosen as the KPI, depending on the nature of the campaign. Goal conversion rate Once your goals are defined, you are able to report on the stats that really matter, and not just on the top-level figures.
6 Running campaigns on the Big Top platform
Running campaigns on the Big Top platform Big Top is an online platform, freely available to public sector organisations, allowing you to quickly and efficiently create landing pages for your campaigns and measure their results. There are a number of features which make it easier to measure the success of your campaigns: Google Analytics and Tag Manager integration Simplified event tracking for reporting sign ups as a goal Built-in analytics tools Sign ups can be broken down by their UTM parameters
Running campaigns on the Big Top platform Every user who fills out a Big Top form will have their details, including the campaign, source, and medium that brought them to the site, added to a database: This allows for reporting on lead generation KPIs without the need for a sophisticated analytics implementation.
Tracking Online Campaigns for Local Authorities Net Natives Analytics Services Google Analytics Audit Tracking and Tag Audit Measurement Plan and Implementation Tracking and Tag Implementation Google Analytics Set-Up & Implementation Google Analytics Basic/ Advanced/Bespoke Training Google Tag Manager Training Reporting and Dashboards
Get in touch: Lucian Glenny Web Analyst lucian.glenny@netnatives.co.uk