Setting up ad ROI tracking with Google Analytics
Set Goals… and goals have values.
If your goals don’t have values, you won’t be able to measure the return on your investment. For example, if you know that 1 out of every 1000 registrants results in a $5000 sale, you can assign a value of $5 to every registrant. Keep it this simple.
Define your goal. In some cases, it’s as easy as a user landing on a registration “thank you” page. When the user navigates to this page, they have reached the conversion goal (Checkout Complete, Registration Confirmation, etc.)
Tag your inbound traffic, and let them wander and explore.
Google Analytics’ link tagging capabilities allow you to uniquely identify virtually any campaign you can think of. Your tagged links will need to contain at least 3 variables:
- “utm_source” … the source of your campaign (Examples of sources are the Google search engine, the AOL search engine, the name of a newsletter, or the name of a referring web site.)
- “utm_medium” … the medium of your campaign (cpc, banner, email)
- “utm_campaign” … the name of your campaign (The campaign dimension differentiates product promotions such as “Spring Ski Sale” or slogan campaigns such as “Get Fit For Summer”.)
As an example, say you have a sky ad on the home page of SiteA.com. You might consider:
utm_source=sitea
utm_medium=banner
utm_campaign=HomeSky
Say, you have another leaderboard banner on SiteB.com, then
utm_source=siteb
utm_medium=banner
utm_campaign=leaderboard
Tip: keep spaces and weird characters OUT of your tags. Use “SpringCampaign”, or “Spring+Campaign”, not “Spring Campaign”
(by keeping consistent in your tag naming you can track the effectiveness of ALL banner across all sources or campaigns, so choose your words carefully, and stay constant)
Tag syntax.
When sending out links in your ads, your links will look like this:
http://www.mysite.com/?utm_source=sitea&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=HomeSky
What happens?
All visiters will land on your home page (or any page for that matter), and they should be free to roam around click around, learn and love. This is exactly what you want, let them roam, since you’ve made a beautiful site, it’s good to let them see it. There’s no need to build special landing pages for each of your campaign efforts. Drive all traffic to you home page, just make sure you tag you efforts. If you site has done its job, they’ll decided to register, they land on your “thank you” page, and Google Analytics is still aware of the source/medium/campaign they originally came from.
Track each ad’s conversion rates.
You can monitor conversion rates for each ad you run. As long as the tag you assign to your inbound URLs is unique for each ad, you’ll see a line item for each ad in the reports. In the Traffic Sources navigation, the “All Traffic Sources” should be most helpful. The sources and mediums will be reported here. This report shows you the number of visits generated by each ad, the average number of pages viewed per visit, and the conversion rates for each of your goals, plus the value (or calculated ROI for each ad unit). These Traffic Sources reports will let you know and compare campaigns, or mediums, or sources, and their respective conversion rates and relative ROI’s.
There’s also an entire suite of reports to analyze your Goals. You can even understand the popular paths people take to complete the goals (registration).
Happy Hunting!
