Download the PDF presentation here: Auto tagging and 3rd Party Tracking Presentation
On Wednesday, Hanapin Marketing had its monthly company-wide training seminar (RedBop). We had some wonderful presentations and were able to get together as a company and share ideas. I worked with Abby and Jeff this month to present on the very broad topic of tagging urls and checking conversion tracking. Today, I’d like to give you a summary of what we discussed with the team, and also provide you with a downloadable copy of the deck if you need any clarity on this topic. This presentation is mainly centered around Google AdWords.
First, Abby gave us a refresher on how auto tagging works for Google Analytics. You can enable auto tagging to append a gclid ID to the end of your destination URL so that you can review data in Analytics. You can also choose to manually tag those urls using either the Google provided URL builder or by creating your own template in Excel. A lot of Hanapin’s clients use some sort of backend tracking system, which requires us to manually tag our keyword or ad destination URLs so that they can receive lead information for further analysis purposes. Some of our clients are taking advantage of the ValueTrack parameters, while others are simply adding their info per keyword. There are different combinations of tracking depending on what your client does and their goals, so our presentation will take you through some unique keyword level tracking methods.
Keyword level tracking is about as granular as it gets. Some clients choose to add a keyword level destination url in their accounts in cases where they don’t have several landing pages to choose from, are looking to gather revenue specific data per keyword or are using a landing page program that allows them to A/B test their pages.
For one of the clients in our presentation, you’ll see that we physically plug in their campaign, ad group, keyword, and match type into our Excel url builder. Each keyword, thus, gets its own unique url. If conversion tracking breaks for this client, we still have lead data to go off of per keyword so bid changes and budget adjustments are still relatively easy to figure out. We’ve also developed a method of “cheats” to easily distinguish mobile, interest targeting, modified broad keywords, etc without having to run our urls through a URL builder again when we duplicate a campaign for these areas.
The last two clients in our presentation use ValueTrack parameters. You can add this manual tagging on both the keyword and ad level as the parameters will dynamically pull your data when the ad is clicked. For one of these clients, this is set up so that we can put better goals on each ad group for making more accurate CPL goals to improve our ROI. The other has this setup alongside Liveball; in the future, they can move to testing landing pages per keyword for the most profitable ones.
You can use ValueTrack parameters along with manually tagging for Analytics if you wish, just make sure that you aren’t choosing an abbreviation that Analytics already uses for their tracking to keep everything working and tracking correctly.
In the last part of the presentation, Jeff covered a bit about what to do when your conversion tracking goes down. Some of our clients will mess with their landing pages from time to time, and things will get a bit messy if the code is moved or deleted. Knowing how often to check and how to check your codes is a great piece of knowledge to know alongside your tracking know-how.
Download the PDF presentation here: Auto tagging and 3rd Party Tracking Presentation
