Website Savvy - Inexpensive Campaign Tracking

Mary C. | 12 January 2005 |

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Inexpensive Campaign Tracking?
Christine Burke, Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc

Question: I have Blizzard Tracker Professional Edition and I’m not quite ready to upgrade to the ROI Edition. I know I don’t have campaign tracking, but is there something I can learn about my pay-per-click campaigns anyway?

Answer: First, let’s review the basics. If you are paying for clicks in Overture, they come in through various referrers, including Yahoo and MSN. That’s why you can’t use referrer tracking to directly identify your visitors from Overture. You do have another option, though. To get some very basic campaign tracking, you can use your Entry Pages report.

Here’s how it works. First, login to your Overture account and set up campaign tracking URLs. It’s the same procedure that you (or your promotion manager) would use if you had the ROI edition. For each term you are bidding on, supply a link to a specific entry page on your site, including a special tracking code.

Example: www.yoursite.com?source=Overture

After you receive some traffic via this link, login to your tracker and view the report called Entry Pages by URL. This will give you basic information about the number of visitors who used that specific link. You can compare this number with the report that you get in your Overture account. You can also look at the Bounce Rate report to see the bounce rate for each entry page (click here to see a previous article on bounce rates).

Entry Pages by URL

Question: So what am I missing? What else would I learn by upgrading to the "real" campaign tracking?

Answer: You’ll have a head start when you upgrade, because your campaign tracking URLs will already be set up. In the tracker under Settings, define your pay-per-click and e-mail campaigns by entry page so that the tracker can recognize them. You can also define other campaigns, such as in directories, by referrer. Here’s a list of the additional information available with the ROI Edition:

1. For each campaign, you can “drill down” to see all the search phrases that were used and how many visitors each phrase generated. It will be easy to compare the performance of the different search terms within each campaign.

2. You can define important “conversion” pages and see how many conversions (also called actions) each campaign delivered. Examples of conversion pages include an information request or an actual sale. With the Professional Edition, you can tell how many visitors a campaign sent. With the ROI Edition, you can tell whether or not they were quality visitors who went to important pages.

3. You can determine which campaigns and which phrases deliver the most paying customers and the most revenues. If your booking engine supports Blizzard Tracker (see our partners page), you can see the actual revenues delivered by each campaign, each search phrase, or each referrer.

4. You can use Path Analysis to see the typical navigation paths from each entry page. You can also use Scenario Analysis to measure abandonment rates all the way from an entry page (campaign) to a conversion page.

For more information about Blizzard Tracker, please visit www.blizzardtracker.com. You can see the new Tour at www.blizzardtracker.com/start.html, and view the live demo by call 888-840-5893.