Planning your Marketing Campaign Tags

Planning your Marketing Campaign Tags

By David Bird

Setting up marketing campaign tags tells us how every campaign is performing.  Performance that goes beyond clicks, performance like how many sales were generated or email subscribers.  You get specific data beyond clicks.

The best way to show you how marketing campaign tags work is to use an example:

An Example Game of Link Tag

Let’s look at an example how you might use the medium, source, and campaign details:

Suppose you’re preparing for a charity golf tournament fundraiser.

To promote the event, you plan to use email blasts, social media posts (Facebook and Twitter), and perhaps a banner ad on a partner or sponsor’s website.

Each of these promotional items will take people to a page on your website where they can get specific event information such as the date, costs, and reservation forms.

You’ll want to know how many people completed the reservation form after viewing your email, social media posts, and advertising so you can optimize current and future marketing programs.

The table below shows examples how the medium, source and campaign might look for the golf tournament example:

Type of Marketing

Source Medium

Campaign

Email marketing / list Email List Name Golf Tournament
Twitter Social t.co (Twitter) Golf Tournament
Facebook Social Facebook Golf Tournament
Press release Affiliate Press Release Golf Tournament
Banner / ad on another website Affiliate Website where ad was placed Golf Tournament

Each medium, source and campaign will now appear in your Google Analytics so you can compare performance on many different levels and have data to improve future marketing.

This structure will ensure that Google Analytics captures data in a way that lets you analyze and compare results with past golf tournaments and even other events. For example:

  • Email performance against other campaigns
  • Social media performance against other campaigns
  • Individual social media performance against others
  • Paid advertising performance against others and against email, social media, etc.
  • Changes in customer behaviour

After a few months of tagging, you’ll have a valuable bank of data to guide you in making objective, data-driven decisions about future campaigns, emails, social media feeds and more.

How to Embed Your Own Tags

For a step by step video demonstration and written instructions on how to embed tags into your links, go to my website Birdseyemarketing.ca.

This post is an excerpt of an earlier article posted on Bird’s Eye Marketing.