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The best tracking solution for online campaigns?

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Subject:  The best tracking solution for online campaigns? Dave Chaffey
Author:   dchaffey:   view profile | all posts by this author | add to favourites
Date:   08:17:41 10 October 2003
 
I have been thinking through the must-have characteristics of the ideal tracking tool which will provide results across a range of online campaigns -
paid search, free search, online ads, affiliates, e-mail. It seems that a lot of e-marketers / agencies are using separate tools for each which makes tracking and improving performance a nightmare.

If a single tool can cover all of these, it becomes easier to target media spend at the best responding media and online vehicles.

This is my checklist of the ideal online campaign tracking tool -

1. Can it track through to point of online sale?
Basic tools will only provide click tracking through to a microsite. More sophisticated tools will show which campaign the online purchases result from.

2. Can it track for a range of online media types?
Ideally you should be able to access a single report for all media including online ads and sponsorship, e-mail marketing, search engine marketing and affiliate marketing.

3. Can return on investment models can be built in?
This enables the cost-effectiveness of different campaigns and different vehicles to be assessed. Ideally it will be possible to view these reports by segment as well as on a campaign/product basis. As a minimum cost per site visitor acquisition and customer acquisition are required.

4. Reports at both a detailed level and a summary level? Some tools will only report overall campaign effectiveness. For example, they will only give the total for several broadcasts within an e-mail campaign ? not individual tracking. For search marketing reports will be needed for individual keyword purchases to decide which to continue using these.

5. Able to track e-mail click-throughs at an individual level?
This is essential for targeting customers with a follow-up message when they have responded to an initial campaign as explained in the section on targeting.

6. Post-view responses are tracked for online advertising?Research from Doubleclick shows that for online advertising the number of people who visit a site later after viewing an ad may give as many responses again as the original clickthrough. Similarly with affiliate marketing, the purchase may occur after several visits. We need to work back to the referrer that achieved the first site visit. Cookies are typically used for this.

7. Post-click responses are tracked for affiliate marketing and online advertising?
For high involvement products it is less likely that a campaign respondent will purchase on their first visit.

8. E-mail campaign summaries give unique clicks as well as total clicks?
What matters most to an e-mail campaign is the number of unique respondents to it rather than the total number of clicks. By default most systems give total clicks, but this can overestimate response to a campaign by 20 to 30%.

9. Real-time reporting?
This flexibility is essential since it allows us to pull poorly performing creative or placements and replace them with more effective tools.

10. Cross-campaign reporting? Knowledge needs to be acquired and shared across an organisation about which campaigns work and which don?t through the year. This is only possible if it easy to compare separate campaigns. Many tools work at the level of an individual campaign. Export functionality to export past campaigns into a spreadsheet may be sufficient here.

That?s a long wish list and very few tools seem to deliver all of these. Those that come closest are the TradeDoubler Media Toolbox (http://www.tradedoubler.com/pan/public/solutions/advertiser/technology_solutions) and the Doubleclick Channel View and DART technology for e-mail marketing and online ad tracking (www.doubleclick.com).

There is a nice case on TradeDoubler (better known as an affiliate network) about how Dell Europe use TradeDoubler for an integrated approach to tracking and managing online sales through partnerships and performance-based marketing such as search marketing. They use it to track performance of long terms strategic partners, affiliate programs, direct marketing and campaigns.

Does anyone have any experience of these tools or can they recommend other tools that fit the characteristics above - have I missed anything?

Dave Chaffey
Specialist e-marketing trainer, consultant and author.
Web: www.marketing-insights.co.uk
eResources and Books: www.marketing-online.co.uk
 
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  • The best tracking solution for online campaigns?, dchaffey, 10 Oct 08:17
    I have been thinking through the must-have characteristics of the ideal tracking tool which will provide results across a range of online campaigns - paid search, free search, on ...
    • The best tracking solution for online campaigns?, ST, 13 Oct 13:09
      Hi Dave, I just noticed your posting and wanted to followup to let you know how HitBox Enterprise can help you out! The HitBox Enterprise product is able to report, in up-to-t ...
      • Specific campaign tools - Conversion Ruler, dchaffey, 13 Oct 13:40
        Thanks Simon, I was thinking of specific campaign tracking tools rather than web analytics tools which have this feature. Most web analytics tools will have a campaigns feat ...
        • Specific campaign tools - Conversion Ruler, ST, 13 Oct 14:13
          Dave, Often this will be the perception, however, in order to fully quantify how successfull your online campaigns are you need to understand how these are affecting the behavio ...
    • The best tracking solution for online campaigns?, marcos, 13 Oct 14:55
      Hello Dave, I agree that it’s far better to use a single tool for website and marketing campaign analysis. You can download a comprehensive document here http://www.e-cons ...
    • The best tracking solution for online campaigns?, dandrury, 13 Oct 15:54
      Dave, Another reply from a web analytics company - this time WebAbacus! I agree with both my colleagues at WSS and WebTraffiq - a single source of analysis is becomming increas ...
    • The best tracking solution for online campaigns?, Martin Filz, 14 Oct 10:48
      dave, I read your email with interest and agree with your points. The one area that was missing was the fact that the measurement should be independent of the delivery of the ba ...
    • The best tracking solution for online campaigns?, ashah, 14 Oct 11:12
      Dave, you are 100% correct. A single, central and holistic view of ALL marketing efforts is vital to a marketer's success. I understand your penchant for keeping Campaign Tra ...
    • The best tracking solution for online campaigns?, amr, 14 Oct 17:19
      > >Does anyone have any experience of these tools or can they >recommend other tools that fit the characteristics above - >have I missed anything? Dave - yes have used Double ...
      • The best tracking solution for online campaigns?, Kevin Zundl, 14 Oct 21:30
        The Campaign+ series of reports that are on the LifeLine service are some of the most actionable that I have seen. You get lead funnels, top paths of leads and can group banners, ...
    • Round-up, dchaffey, 14 Oct 17:20
      Thanks for all your contributions, guys. It seems there's more on offer from the web analytics vendors than I was aware of - I think many are missing a trick by not explaining ...
      • RE: Round-up, Ashley , 15 Oct 11:16
        Hi Dave Your round up point about different teams needing different things from web analytics (and indeed your original question) is a crucial and very interesting one. Based on ...
      • Round-up, Colin Cooper, 16 Oct 16:24
        Two additional factors you need to take into account are: 1) value and profitability of both the actual sale and subsequent sales. What marketers are looking for is customers wi ...
    • The best tracking solution for online campaigns?, mark.lambert@iperceptions.com, 6 Feb 09:50
      Dave, read this with interest. Which i followed back from your later comments on online emasurement. Interested to know why these comments are made as if they are something n ...
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