Articles on: Strategy

Tracking Your Campaign Performance

Tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns is crucial for running an effective and cost-efficient campaign.

We often get asked what the right strategy for marketing is, and the honest answer is we don’t know. There are best practices, certainly. You can give yourself a running start, yes. But human behavior is too erratic to be able to predict.

The only way to find out what works, is to test different options, and track which one works best.

Now, there are multiple things you can test and track in your campaign. Some of those have been built right into the JCN dashboard for your convenience. Others occur after people visit your site, where we no longer have information about them. It is there that having your own analytics set up is crucial, and we’ll give you some tips on doing that as well.

One caveat: what defines a successful campaign can change from case to the next. Sometimes you want exposure. Other times you’ll want clicks. Your ultimate goal might be conversions, purchases, or leads. Whatever your goal, there is a way to track it, but you must begin with the end in mind.

On The Dashboard



On the JCN dashboard, we have several different types of analytics we provide. First, each campaign has an analytics overview. This is great for getting the big picture at a glance.

But the real benefit comes when you click through:

Each of these links leads to a wealth of data

By Day – if you click “detailed stats” in a campaign, you’ll be able to see a breakdown of a campaign’s performance by days of the month. This can be useful for finding patterns in people’s behaviors – are more people clicking on your grocery store ad on the days leading up to Shabbos?



By Site – if you’re running an ad that appears on more than one site and click “edit placement”, you’ll be able to see which sites your campaign is appearing on and which are the most effective. You’ll might find that some sites are getting you more impressions, while others might be serving less impressions but getting more clicks.



By Media – if you click “edit media” you’ll be able to see all the past ads you’ve created and how well they’ve performed. Here too, you can see which ad is getting the most clicks (by default, we’ll show all the ads equally so unless you started them at different times, they should all have a very similar number of impressions).



Optimization


In all these cases, when you see something underperforming, whether a publisher or an ad – turn it off! And then try to replicate the success to see if you can get even better results. Do people like a certain image? Try a similar one. Are readers from Matzav clicking on your ad disproportionately? That’s valuable information to know.

On your own site



Once people click through to your own site, we no longer can tell you what they’ve done. But with the help of Google analytics, there is a lot more valuable information you can find out.

Now, setting up in-depth analytics is an entire profession; but these steps should point you in the right direction, let you know what areas you might need to hire some professional help for, and make sure that you at least get started with the basics.

Integrate Google Analytics


The first step is to install Google analytics on your site. How to do so is beyond the scope of this article, and depends on what site you have. But the basics are that you need to set yourself up with a free analytics account, get a code from your admin settings (see the screenshot below), and add it to your site header.




UTM Tags


As soon as the code is installed, Google will start giving you information about your visitors. However, this information might not be detailed enough for your needs. Google might tell you that people clicked on a link to arrive at your site, but you want to know what link. Was it the link in the headline that said “buy now”, or the one that said “offer ends today”? Because if you know that, you’ll also be able to know which of those ads actually converted into the buying customers you were aiming for.

For that, Google offers another free tool called the URL builder, often referred to as UTM tagging. By adding some additional info the to the link you put in your ads, you can include a lot of valuable for Google to include in your analytics.



Simply add the additional info about your campaign in the URL builder, and it’ll append that to the URL to your site, which you can then copy from the bottom of the URL builder page and put directly into your JCN campaign.



You can then view your Campaigns in Google analytics to see how a specific campaign has performed, right down to the details about an individual ad.




Goal Tracking


Now, to take things to the next level, you’re gonna want to tell Google what your goals are. You can create multiple goals for Google to keep track of, from people contacting you for more info to actually making online purchases.

There are some simple yet creative ways for Google to know when a goal has been reached – for example, if every person who completes an order gets redirected to a thank you page, Google can know that all the visitors to that page are, in fact, successful customers, and report that back to you.

Setting up goals is also an art, but the basics can be set up once again from the admin settings of the analytics dashboard. Note that ecommerce has its own separate settings as well because of how complex it can get.



Retargeting



If we’re already on the topic of analytics, it’s worth noting one final thing. One of the most effective ways to maximize your marketing budget is with a retargeting campaign. Retargeting means Google will collect information about who visited your site and allow you to run additional campaigns in the future specifically to those people.

It’s much easier, and therefore cheaper, to get someone who already visited your site to come back. Even if you’re not ready to set up a remarketing campaign just yet, you can still start collecting this valuable data about your site visitors, which you can then put to use in a future campaign when the time is right.

Again, in your admin settings, you’ll find a setting to start collecting remarketing data on your website. Switch it on and hit save to and you’ll have set the opportunity in motion.



Next Steps



If you’ve mad it this far, congratulations! You’re committed to harnessing technology and data to make the most of your marketing campigns and budgets. Start with adding analytics to your site and building some UTM tags for your campaigns, then dive deeper into the data when you start to feel more comfortable.

Google has some great free resources to learn more about their analytics tools, and as always, we are here to help and advise every step of the way!

Updated on: 10/30/2019

Was this article helpful?

Share your feedback

Cancel

Thank you!