Campaign Analytics

What is Campaign Analytics?

A typical online marketing cycle consists of 4 distinct stages:

1. Reach is the likelihood of gaining your prospective visitor’s attention
2. Acquisition is defined as how successful you are in getting these visitors
3. Conversion is persuading the visitor to take the desired action
4. Retention is getting the customer to buy again

Campaign Analysis is a part of the overall web analytics process, consisting of tracking, measuring and optimizing website visitor traffic and reach and acquisition initiatives.

It is a crucial component of the entire web analytics process simply because most of the online budget is invested in acquiring visitor traffic to the website. We can help you optimize the marketing campaign spend by tracking and measuring the effectiveness of campaigns at the broad channel level all the way to a creative or key phrase level.

Web visitor traffic acquisition types can be broadly categorized into:

1. Online channels: Banners, affiliate programs, PPC, Emails and PR/ social media initiatives
2. Offline Channels: Print, TV, Radio, Direct mails, POS ads, OOH media etc

Why analyze marketing campaigns?

The primary marketing campaign goals for any online business is to achieve a higher ROI through eliminating non performing campaign costs and increasing conversions.

We know that all visits to a website are not equal, and visitor behavior varies with the source type, such as media channels, source websites, creative types, landing pages, keywords, geography etc. Hence, it is important to understand how each of these is performing with the objective of increasing quality visitors to the website and lowering the traffic acquisition cost.

Campaign Analytics provides insights into the behavior of visitors after they click on a banner ad or a search keyword and arrive at your website through a campaign landing page (as shown in the figure below).

From the above figure we can see various stages from the time the visitor sees an ad till the final conversion. At all stages, we can see a certain percentage of visitors dropping off. This drop off is the most important element we can measure through website campaign analytics.

The landing page bounce rate from banner ads or PPC ads can be as high as 80%. This means that out of 100 people arriving on your site, only 20 are continuing to further engage with the website. The main optimization objective is to reduce the drop off so that overall conversion improves and the acquisition costs are lowered significantly.

1. High drop off at the first level (i.e low CTR): At the broad level it may indicate underperforming creative or media sources. By drilling down at the individual placement, creative type, ad size and keyword level we can identify the best performing ads and eliminate the poor performing combinations
2. High drop off at the second level (i.e low entries to clicks ratio): This may indicate that the landing page is not loading properly
3. High drop off at the third level (i.e high bounce rate): This may indicate that there is a mismatch between the ad creative and the landing page, or the landing page is poorly designed or confusing
4. High drop off at the fourth level (low registration page visits): This may indicate poor visitor quality from the traffic source or suboptimal navigation structure of the website
5. High drop off at the fifth level (low registrations to registration page visits): This indicates too long or confusing forms pages

Website campaign analytics can answers questions such as the following

1. How do various marketing channels compare in terms of sending cost effective visitors to the website?
2. How do offline media channels compare with the online media channels?
3. Geographical breakup of visits from media channels helps in optimizing both offline and online media spend
4. Which marketing channel sends the most engaging audience?
5. Which marketing channel sends high quality visitors to your website? Those visitors who engage in any desired action on your website?
6. How different landing pages are performing?
7. Which combinations of creative, media and landing pages perform the best and which ones are underperforming?
8. Which combination of search engine, ad groups and keywords sends the most engaging audience, with least bounce rates and lowest cost per conversion?
9. Which referral sources are sending quality traffic which is converting?
10. Which press releases are generating traffic to the website? Which influential forum/ blogger is sending quality traffic?
11. What percentage of visitors from PR campaigns/ social sites completed a conversion?

Contact us to outsource campaign analysis.