Omniture Site Catalyst: Campaign Conventions in the Tracking Code Report

The campaign reports in Site Catalyst relay information about the performance and results of advertising campaigns. Analyzing the campaign reports can offer valuable insights into the types of advertising and channel sources that are most effective in driving traffic, success events, and/or conversions on your site. 

Campaign tracking codes are an essential tool to track the specific traffic your advertising campaigns are yielding.  A carefully constructed naming convention for the tracking code parameter value passed by the campaign ID is essential to maximizing the value inherent in the campaign reports. The tracking code report within the Campaign reporting section of Site Catalyst displays the tracking code value from the campaign ID. 

For example, if a visitor arrives at your site via a tagged paid search destination URL, they may arrive from a referring URL that looks something like http://www.riseinteractive.com?cid=PSG123456. At Rise, we use a structured nomenclature for the prefix of the parameter value to indicate the channel from which the traffic derives.  For example, we may use any of the following prefixes:
EM = Email
FB = Facebook
D = Display
PSG/PSM = Paid Search
Google/MSN

These prefixes can be further classified using a SAINT file (SiteCatalyst Attribute Importing and Naming Tool) to generate a report displaying more ‘friendly’ naming and avoiding the unnecessary use of additional tags to differentiate campaign attributes. The second component of the Rise naming convention uses a series of numeric values that correlate to launch dates, campaign names, geographic segmentation and any other pertinent information. By employing this method, we are able to capture and convey valuable data about advertising campaign effectiveness, but in a manner that is completely transparent—or at least amounts to nothing more than a series of numbers in the destination URL—to the visitor. The traffic code is completely unique and customizable so that SiteCatalyst is able to readily differentiate one campaign result from another. Again, the numeric system we implement can be cross-referenced and classified using a SAINT file.

Within the tracking code report, users can access the full complement of Site Catalyst variables to tailor a report that displays all the factors affecting the website’s success metrics. Campaigns can be assessed for traffic, revenue, conversion and even action-oriented data like cart removals. As with other SiteCatalyst reports, results can be filtered for specific criteria, exported, ranked and trended over time, and compared over different time periods. Also, because the campaign variable has full sub-relations enabled by default, conversions and success events are attributed to the campaign tracking code we have created and stored in the visitor’s cookie.