Marketing Campaign Data Integration

This article was contributed by Benjamin Mangold, Director of Digital & Analytics at Loves Data, a digital analytics and online marketing agency based in Australia. He lives and breathes Google Analytics. He is a regular speaker on Google Analytics and Google AdWords topics and consults with leading brands on integrated online campaigns.

In this chapter you learn how to integrate data from all your marketing campaigns into Google Analytics using both UTM parameters (discussed in Chapter 1, “Implementation Best Practices”) and the Data Import feature.

The chapter starts with an overview of Google Analytics acquisition channels, and then provides best practices when it comes to tagging both online and offline marketing campaigns. Finally, you learn how to use the Data Import feature to upload all your marketing campaigns data into Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Acquisition Channels

Google Analytics automatically measures a whole range of different ways people find your website. If you navigate to the Acquisition reports, you'll find insights about how people are finding you online. As shown in Figure 9-1, the Overview report provides a summary of these insights.

The default channel groupings you'll find in this report include:

• Direct most commonly includes people who know the URL of your website (and they open a new browser and type the URL). More generally, a session is attributed to direct traffic when no information about the referral source is available or when the referring source or search term has been configured to be ignored (see the “Excluding Referrals” section in Chapter 1.)
• Organic Search shows you the people who have clicked through from an organic listing on a search engine.
• Referral groups people who find your website by clicking on a link on another website. (For example, if someone links to your website in a blog post or a comment in a forum.)
• Social indicates people who navigate to your website using a link from a social network.

Figure 9-1: Google Analytics Acquisition reports overview

Once you've linked your Google AdWords account to Google Analytics, as explained in Chapter 2, “AdWords Integration,” you will be able to see these additional channel groupings:

• Paid Search indicates your linked Google AdWords account or other tracked paid ads.
• Display is similar to Paid Search, but for text, image, and rich media ads placed on the Google Display Network or other ad networks.

You can also customize your channel grouping to compare the performance of your branded and generic paid keywords, as explained in Chapter 2. Your company and product names are “brand” terms, while descriptive words are considered “generic.” For example, Google is a branded keyword, while search engine is a generic keyword.

To do this, navigate to Admin and select Manage Brand Terms in the Channel Settings option in the right column. You can then add custom brand terms and terms that are automatically suggested by Google Analytics. Once you have defined your brand terms you will see the Branded Paid Search and Generic Paid Search channels displayed in your report.

The Acquisition reports (shown in Figure 9-1) can also include additional custom campaign data. Chapter 1 briefly discussed best practices when it comes to tagging custom campaigns with UTM parameters. This is important to implement before integrating your custom marketing campaign data. More detailed campaign tagging is discussed in the next section, but if you see the following rows, chances are you already use campaign tags.

• Email is for any inbound marketing campaign that Google Analytics sees as coming from email. For example, if you have a campaign-tagged URL in your email newsletter that includes email.
• (Other) is for any campaign-tagged URLs that fall outside of the other channel groupings.

Tagging Custom Marketing Campaigns

Campaign tags allow you to measure your own custom marketing initiatives with Google Analytics, enabling you to extend beyond the standard traffic sources and marketing channels found in standard reports. Custom campaign tags can be used for any inbound marketing campaign you are running and are commonly used for measuring the following:

• Email campaigns
• Social media ads
• Non-AdWords CPC (cost-per-click)
• Offline campaigns

In order to measure these campaigns, you need to modify the inbound links that direct people to your website or app. By adding additional details to the end of these links, Google Analytics can report on the campaigns that they are a part of. These additional details (query parameters) are called UTM campaign tags.

Let's say you are running an ad on LinkedIn that directs people to your website. Your existing ad might have a destination URL such as the following:

http://www.mysite.com/contact-us

But you can modify this URL to include campaign tags, ending up with a URL such as:

http://www.mysite.com/contact-us?utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_medium=social&utm_
campaign=linkedin%20ads

This would allow you to see the following details inside Google Analytics reports:

Campaign tags allow you to define a source, medium, and campaign name, along with optional keyword and content parameters. Since you define all of these elements, you have control over what will be displayed in your reports as people click through to your website. You can read about details of each custom tag parameter in the “Tagging Custom Campaigns” section in Chapter 1.

Remember that whatever you define for your campaign tag values will be displayed on your reports. It can be a good idea to open the Acquisition section (left sidebar on your Google Analytics interface) and navigate to the All Traffic and Campaigns report (see Figure 9-2), because this is where the values of your campaign tags appear. Use this link to access the report directly http://goo.gl/Ni851C.

Take the time to ask yourself what you want to see in these reports, since whatever you define as your source, medium, campaign, and optional term and content will be displayed there.

Figure 9-2: Google Analytics campaign report

Measuring Online Campaigns

Let's look at some different ways to use campaign tags for your online marketing campaigns. These are best practice guidelines that can be tweaked and modified to meet your own specific reporting requirements.

Measuring people who click through from your email newsletters and promotions is an important starting point. There is no single way to campaign-tag these links, but one option is to use the source to define the particular edition you are sending out to people. Try to keep the medium short and simple (this example uses email). You can then define your own campaign name and use the optional content parameter to distinguish individual links in your email. The optional term is left blank because this should only be used for search-based keywords from non-AdWords paid search marketing. See the example in the following table.

Now you can use the Google Analytics URL Builder at http://goo.gl/0iPxIA to create your campaign-tagged links and then place them in your email newsletter.

Campaign-tagging your non-AdWords CPC campaigns allows you to compare the performance of the different networks. For example, if you're running search ads on Bing, you can also tag your destination URLs so you know these clicks are not reported as organic. You'll notice that the optional term and content parameters include some special elements—these automatically include the keyword you are bidding on and the ID of the particular ads clicked. You can then customize the campaign name to reflect your particular needs.

If you're running ads on social media, you should also tag the inbound links. Here are two examples:

Defining the medium as social allows you to see click-throughs from your ads in the campaigns reports, as well as in the dedicated social reports in the Acquisition section. Again, you will want to customize the campaign name and content parameters.

Measuring Offline Campaigns

You can also measure offline campaigns that direct people to your website using campaign tags. Let's say you're placing an ad in the local newspaper for a special offer and you want people to visit your website. You can set up a special URL that redirects people to your landing page along with your campaign tags.

For example, your landing page might be located here:

http://www.mysite.com/offer/summer-promotion

And you create a campaign-tagged URL like so:

http://www.mysite.com/offer/summer-promotion?utm_source=newspaper&utm_
medium=offline&utm_campaign=newspaper%20ad

The next step is to work with your web developer to set up an URL redirect, avoiding the need to include a long, unsightly URL in your print ad. This means you can set up an URL such as:

http://www.mysite.com/promotion

The short URL would then redirect to your tagged URL.

Alternatively, you can consider using a URL shortener to create short links that redirect to any link you provide. Google offers such a service for free at http://goo.gl (used throughout this book), but if you want to use a customized short URL, you can also try http://bit.ly.

The following are a few examples of campaign tags for newspaper ads, brochures, and billboards:

The main thing to remember is to define your source, medium, and campaign clearly so that they are not confused with your online ads. In most cases, you will want to leave the optional term and content blank.

Cost Data Import

Unlike Google AdWords reports, campaigns measured using campaign-tagged URLs do not include details about what happens before people click through to your website. For example, in Google AdWords reports you can see the number of impressions of your ads and the click-through rate (CTR). This is where Cost Data Import comes in, as it allows you to import data about your custom campaigns. Cost Data is one of the dataset types that can be integrated to Google Analytics through the Data Import feature (as described in Chapter 7, “Custom Data Integration”).

Uploading details like impressions, CTR, and cost for your custom campaigns is important, especially if you are running Google AdWords campaigns—they give you additional context when evaluating the success of all your marketing initiatives. For example, if you are running paid campaigns through Google AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you need to be able to compare the conversion rate against the cost of running the campaigns. This allows you to understand the ROI (return on investment) that different marketing initiatives are generating. You can use that information to make smart decisions about future budget allocations.

You always had the ability to export data from Google AdWords and Google Analytics in order to compare campaign performance. You can even export the data from your custom campaigns and merge the additional data inside Google Drive or Excel, but this can be a tedious process. This is where Google Analytics Cost Data Import comes in. You can use it to import the extra pieces of data that belong to your non-AdWords paid campaigns. This means you can quickly evaluate the performances of all your campaigns and compare advertising costs and ROI, right in the Google Analytics interface.

The Cost Data Import Process

Before you start, it's important to understand that custom data is uploaded to a property inside Google Analytics and is then applied to one or more views, as shown in Figure 9-3. If you have a large-scale implementation, you will have to repeat the process if you want data available within views that are contained in different properties. For most cases, this won't be needed, but it is good to remember that upload is at the property level and not the account level.

Figure 9-3: The Import Data scheme

Another critical thing to check is that you are using campaign tags on your inbound links to ensure that you can match your cost data to data that is available from your Google Analytics reports. The campaign tags you use will become the key that you use to combine the data inside your reports.

In the following sections, you learn how to import Cost Data into Google Analytics, starting from the second step in the following list, as the first step was already discussed in the previous section.

1. Ensure that you are using UTM campaign tags.
2. Download cost data from non-AdWords sources.
3. Set up your custom dataset.
4. Format your data for upload.
5. Upload your data into Google Analytics.

Step 2: Download Cost Data from Non-AdWords Sources

Unless you already know what data is available for your custom campaigns, the best starting point is to download the data you have available before configuring the dataset inside Google Analytics. If you are running ads on third-party advertising networks, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, you should be able to download Clicks, Cost, and Impressions at a minimum.

LinkedIn If you are going to upload data for your LinkedIn ads, you first need to download the data from LinkedIn Campaign Manager. You can find this under the Reporting tab, as shown in Figure 9-4.

Figure 9-4: Downloading data from the LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Facebook Within the Facebook Ads Manager, click on Reports in the menu on the left and ensure that the current report is set to General Metrics with campaign-level reporting, as shown in Figure 9-5. Next, click on Breakdown and select Daily. You can now select Export and select the CSV option.

Figure 9-5: Downloading data from Facebook Ads reporting

Twitter Log into your Twitter Ads account, select the appropriate date range, and then click Export. This will allow you to download a CSV that gives a daily breakdown for your campaigns (see Figure 9-6).

Figure 9-6: Downloading Twitter campaign data

Step 3: Set Up Your Custom Dataset

The next step is to set up the custom dataset. To do this, start by navigating to the Admin section and selecting the appropriate property.

Within the property, select Data Import, click the + New Data Set button, select Cost Data, and then click Next Step. Now you will need to name the dataset and select the view(s) where you want this data to be available. Following this step, you will see a screen similar to Figure 9-7.

For example, if you are going to upload cost data from ads on LinkedIn, you would create a new dataset called LinkedIn, which would then store all of your LinkedIn data. In most cases, you'll need to create multiple custom datasets for each of your advertising channels. This means if you advertise on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, you need to create three separate datasets. You can read more about Data Import limitations and specifications at http://goo.gl/3k1hdm.

Now you should configure the dataset so that when you import your cost data, Google Analytics reads the correct data into your reports and assigns your cost data to the correct ads.

You need to select the columns of data that you have available from the data that you previously downloaded. At a minimum, you need Medium, Source, and either Impressions, Clicks, or Cost. In most cases, you will want to add all of these in order to gain more insight from the data.

If you open the report downloaded for the LinkedIn example, you can see you have columns for Impressions, Total Clicks, and Total Spend, which you can use for Impressions, Clicks, and Cost. Since this data is from LinkedIn, it is safe to assume that Medium is CPC, as you are paying for the clicks, and Source is linkedin.com, because that is where your ads have been displayed. For LinkedIn, you can also use Ad Content for each ad variation and Destination URL, which is the landing page where users land from the ads.

Figure 9-7: Setting up a custom dataset

If you select Medium, Source, Campaign, Ad Content, or Keyword for columns in your dataset, each of these needs to directly correspond to UTM campaign tags that are already available on your reports (before you upload data).

For example, if you don't set any UTM campaign tags for your LinkedIn campaigns, and then define values for these parameters within your CSV for upload, the data still won't correspond to anything on your reports.

The Import Behavior option (see the bottom of Figure 9-7) you select tells Google Analytics what to do if you upload multiple pieces of data for the same day. For example, Summation sums the uploaded data; if you uploaded a dataset for $10 on January 1, 2015 and then later uploaded another dataset with a value of $15, these would be summed to equal $25.

When you are happy with the columns, click the Get Schema button. This will show you the first line that is needed in your CSV file. You can also click the Download Schema Template button to get this in Excel format.

Once you have the header for your CSV file, you need to get all of the data into that format. For example, if your schema header looks like this:

ga:date,ga:medium,ga:source,ga:adClicks,ga:adCost,ga:impressions

Then this means the first column needs to contain the date, the second column the medium, the third column the source, and so on. The schema tells you what you will need inside your CSV spreadsheet before you upload it to Google Analytics.

Step 4: Format Your Data for Upload

If you are working in a spreadsheet (before exporting to CSV format), you will have something along the following lines:

You need to get the data you have into the correct format. You might need to adjust some values so that Google Analytics accepts them. This includes the first column, which needs to be the date. Each day should be a row on your spreadsheet and the date needs to be in the format of year, month, and day. Data for December 29, 2014 would be formatted as 20141229. For example:

If you have been working in Excel or Google Drive, you need to export this as a CSV file ready for upload. This will give you a file that contains something like this:

ga:date,ga:medium,ga:source,ga:adClicks,ga:adCost,ga:impressions
20141229,cpc,linkedin.com,135,302.4,10732
20141230,cpc,linkedin.com,93,90.21,3090

You are now ready to upload the data into Google Analytics.

Step 5: Upload Your Data into Google Analytics

Navigate back to Admin within Google Analytics and select Data Import. You will see the name of the dataset you previously created, as shown in Figure 9-8.

Figure 9-8: Uploading campaign data into Google Analytics

Select Manage Uploads and then click Upload File and Choose Files. This allows you to select and upload the CSV you created. Your cost data will now be uploaded and processed into your reports.

Analyzing Marketing Campaigns

From here you can begin analyzing the campaign performance within Google Analytics. The Cost Analysis report is available in the Acquisition section. This report automatically calculates CTR and average CPC from your click and impression data, as shown in Figure 9-9.

Figure 9-9: Cost Analysis report

It's important to ensure you have your goals configured (and ecommerce if you are selling online), as this will give you the data that you need in order to analyze marketing acquisition performance, including return-per-click (RPC), return on investment (ROI), and margin. When using these metrics, remember that they are calculated against your advertising cost, so they will not include any costs or investment other than the actual amount you paid for the clicks.

You might want to consider exporting this data into Google Drive and performing your own calculations, so you can factor in elements like human resources (the amount of time needed to create and manage your campaigns), profit margin (if you are focused on ecommerce transactions), and even customer lifetime value (CLV).

Whatever you decide, you want to identify campaigns that have a higher likelihood to convert, along with higher value (where you look at ROI and CLV). Once you identify your top-performing campaigns, you can begin to perform more in-depth analysis on the poor performing campaigns and start incrementally testing campaign changes to see if you can improve performance.

Summary

In this chapter you learned how to integrate marketing campaign data into Google Analytics in order to understand how different campaigns compare not only in terms of traffic, but also in terms of overall results.

In order to integrate the data you need to perform two main steps:

1. Tag your campaign links with UTM parameters: This step enables you to start understanding traffic patterns from your campaigns and will later be used as the key to merge the cost data imported.
2. Import cost data to Google Analytics: This step consists of downloading data from your non-AdWords advertising campaigns and uploading this data into Google Analytics in order to enrich your acquisition reports.

Once you have completed these steps, you will be able to start analyzing and comparing CTR, average CPC, and other metrics across your entire advertising traffic.