What is cross channel monitoring?
It’s a boring name for something that is actually quite exciting for marketers.
This is the idea that messages can be distributed across multiple marketing channels, and customers will respond to each.
It is possible to see how different channels affect and amplify each other. Ask more questions about your campaigns. How many impressions do it take for an average person to decide whether a message is worth their time?
Cross-channel tracking and attribution allow marketers to see which channels have the highest return on investment (ROI). We can spend more on what works.
Collecting data
There are many details to consider when implementing a marketing analysis system. If you don’t, your campaign’s results won’t be accurately represented in the data.
It is now more difficult than ever to find your website, app or business location on the internet.
You never know when your next customer will come across your display ad in a newsletter or get a recommendation from someone in Slack. It is vital to monitor and understand the interactions. This data will allow you to identify more qualified traffic sources and help you determine the most effective shopping experiences for conversion.
Too many businesses fail to create a structure for cross-channel tracking in marketing analytics. This is a big problem.
These are the three most common mistakes I’ve seen in cross-channel tracking.
- Campaigns are incorrectly named
A typical campaign will use several channels to communicate your message, including AdWords and Facebook Ads. Double Click is just one example.
It’s easy for campaigns to be named inconsistently with so many channels. On Adwords you might have “winter campaign”, “Q4 campaign” and “Q4 campaign” on Facebook. You will eventually want to combine all the marketing data from each channel in one place so you can view the overall campaign performance.
They can quickly get very messy. You can solve this problem by creating a consistent process for naming campaigns and bringing all data into a data collection platform.
2. Your conversions may be double or triple counted.
This is a common error that many people make.
You might buy Facebook Ads to help you with your campaign. A cookie is automatically downloaded to a user’s computer when they see your Facebook ad. It might take several days for the user to visit your website and make a purchase. Facebook will count conversions as long as the cookie remains on the user’s computer.
Google Analytics also counts conversions but does it a bit differently. It tracks URL’s to show how users came to your website.
Since most marketing teams now use multiple tracking platforms, Now you have two systems that each count conversions in their own way. When it comes time to report, many people simply add up the totals. It’s not as simple as that.
It’s important to choose one source of conversion tracking and ensure that it is correctly implemented.
3. You are not consistent in tracking URLs
You should use URLs that contain UTM parameters if you’re using Google Analytics to track the campaign.
The basic URL would be…
https://www.adeptcreative.com/
This is how a URL with a UTM parameter looks like…
Adept Creative
&utm_term=Content%20marketing%2C%20Digital%20marketing%2C%20SEO
%2C%20analytics%2C%20email%2C%20drip&utm_content=Guide
%20to%20cross%20channel%20tracking/
UTM parameters are bits of information that inform Google Analytics about the additional information.
More information on UTM parameters
Up to 81% do some online research before they make a purchase. It is important to understand how visitors are finding your website. UTM parameters are one of the best ways to find out.
UTM parameters can be described as five tags that you can add at the end of URLs to your promotional or marketing efforts. Analytics software can track data such as the number of visitors to your site, their interaction with campaign content, and how they came to it. UTM parameters allow you to tag your links in order to measure the effectiveness of campaigns, and to identify the best ways for driving more visitors to your site.
The content of the post doesn’t change by adding the UTM parameter. It allows analytics to analyze the origin and basic engagement information of the visitor. Let’s look at each of the possible UTM tags.
- Source: This is used to identify the site from which visitors came.
- Medium: This is used to indicate which marketing channels brought the visitor to your website. Ex email, social, PPC.
- Campaign: This is used to identify the campaign with which the promotion is associated.
- Term: This term is used to manually identify the paid keywords that you are targeting in your campaign
- Content: This is used to identify which element of your ad/promotion was clicked. This information is used often for optimization.
A combination of these five tags can be used by your team to help you gain valuable insight into which promotions are driving traffic to your website. These data will allow you to determine which campaigns are performing well and which ones may not. This data can be used to optimize, experiment, and personalize your website’s content or promotions.
UTM parameters can be used in messaging, email and social campaigns to determine which channels are most effective for your buyer personas. Your team can identify which channels are most effective to help them target the content that is most popular. This will positively impact their campaigns’ return on investment (ROI).
UTM naming conventions
Your UTM parameters should match a pattern like
- All channels should have the same utm_campaign
- Different utm_sources and utm_mediums depending on the channel
- If you were paid acquisition, the display ad placement would decide what goes into utm_content
- If you were to use paid search, the term would utm_term
The consistency of UTM parameters naming conventions simplifies downstream analysis. It also makes it easier to query across dimensions such as which medium or source was best or which display ad resulted in the most conversions.
UTM URL Builder
To add UTM parameters for your custom links, you can use the Google Analytics campaign URL maker
The Google Analytics dashboard can be used to sort and analyze your traffic by different parameters.
You’ll be unable to track a customer’s journey across channels, from awareness to engagement to closer, if the tracking URLs don’t get created consistently.
Recommendation
This can be fixed by creating a spreadsheet that includes a predefined set of metrics. This will allow you to know which words are being used by the user when creating tracking URLs
