Learn how to effectively manage marketing channels by applying best practices, avoiding common mistakes, and leveraging UTM tracking to gain accurate insights into campaign performance. This guide covers setup tips, auditing strategies, and solutions to common pitfalls like missing data, bot traffic, and privacy challenges.

In today's digital landscape, Marketing Channels play a pivotal role in businesses' strategies for customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. As the customer journey becomes increasingly omnichannel, understanding and effectively managing these channels is crucial.

UTM parameters are tags added to URLs to help track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. They provide valuable information about the source, medium, campaign, term, and content of a link.

Now that we have mastered Marketing Channels and understand UTM parameters, this guide shares tips and best practices to help you measure campaign performance more accurately.

Best Practices

Overwriting channels

When setting up Marketing Channel processing rules, a great idea is to always set a priority, or a level of importance to each channel. Naturally, channels that you invest in should take priority in front of less important channels, like Direct traffic for example.

One way to do this is by making sure your least important channels, the ones that do not bring valuable insight, can be overridden. You can do this in the Marketing Channel Manager by going to Admin > Report Suites, selecting your suite, then Edit Settings > Marketing Channels > Marketing Channel Manager, and ticking ‘Override Last-Touch Channel’ for the desired channels.

For example, a good practice could be to override your Direct or Unknown traffic for scenarios where a user typed in your website URL, and then also accessed the website from a search engine. You want to ensure that the information about the search engine source is registered, as this is crucial to correctly analyze performance.

Following the same logic, we can consider the opposite scenario, where we have a user accessing a platform via an email marketing campaign. Then, the same user would click on a bookmark they have saved of the same website in their browser. We would not want to lose valuable information that helps us understand the performance of that campaign.

For further insight and deep dive, we can combine analyzing how First and Last Touch Channels correlate to each other for a website or even for specific pages. These help understand the user’s behavior in terms of different ways of accessing and researching a brand but also pinpoint which one is most effective.

Understanding persistency and expiration time

Adjusting the expiration setting is crucial because it determines how long a visitor's previous activity is attributed to the first touch channel. The default expiration setting is 30 days. This can be adjusted by accessing Admin > Report Suites > Edit Settings > Marketing Channels > Marketing Channel Expiration.

Visitors must be inactive for 30 days for this period to expire and for channels (both first and last touch) to be reset. If they are continuously using your website, then the engagement window is rolling with them. Marketing channel expiration settings consist of the following:

• Days of Inactivity: The number of days that must pass before a visitor’s first-touch engagement expires. The default value is 30.
• Never: The visitor’s engagement period does not expire.
• Channel Reset: Expires all visitor engagement periods. If you need to reset all marketing channel data, you can expire all visitor engagement periods. You may need to reset data if your processing rules were previously configured incorrectly. All first and last touch channel values will immediately expire and reset when visitors return.

Customize and enrich your tracking codes

A great approach to understanding how different campaign placements perform is to make your campaign tracking codes as detailed as possible. You can do that by creating your internal campaign URL generator tool and including information such as campaign name, campaign type, activation platform, user segment, domain and placement type.

Regular audit

The key to a healthy analytics set-up is knowing your data and monitoring it. Regularly audit your setup across all channels. This includes checking traffic volumes for any discrepancies or identifying tracking code errors that might skew your data.

This also applies when validating campaign results across multiple data sources. In the absence of an end-to-end analytics integration, it can be difficult to understand how ad impressions or email clicks can be correlated to website visits and sales. That’s why defining a reporting framework from inception and agreeing on what delta is acceptable is a first step towards success.

Potential pitfalls: What could go wrong? How to navigate?

Unknown traffic? When it comes to marketing channels, the most common issue is not being able to identify where your users are coming from correctly. Below are some potential angles that you might want to explore if you are also facing this challenge.

No tracking codes

The most common issue that affects even the best of us is caused by missing tracking codes. When working with multiple teams and agencies, the process can be easily lost in translation. The emails go out, traffic spikes, and without historical context, you may end up digging deep to find the cause.

The process of correctly adding tracking codes to your campaign content should be well documented and reiterated with every occasion. As simple as the steps may be, they are easy to overlook.

Bots or fake traffic?

Adobe Analytics offers the option to configure bot rules, and most websites have other security measures to stop attacks as well. However, it’s important to always keep an eye out for anomalies and suspicious user behavior. Large brands can sometimes be an easy target for malicious activities, such as click farming. By analyzing and comparing different data sets, understanding Marketing Channels evolution, and ensuring customer data exchanges are real. You can be one step ahead.

Privacy & regulation

Most platforms these days have a cookie control feature enabled, which gives users the choice to opt in or out of cookies and tracking. Always keep in mind that this has an impact on the percentage of users you are able to track.

A way to estimate the real number is by having additional sources of data that you can compare against (that is, sales records). This should help you calculate the percentage of users who reject cookies and enable more accurate, closer to reality estimates.

The analytics team should have a great understanding of how the cookie control impacts tracking as well. What happens after the user accepts cookies? Does Analytics trigger immediately, or does it wait until the next page view? This is where collaboration between the analytics and the development team is key to develop a robust solution.

Browsers and security updates

Following on from the cookie topic, most browsers are also rolling out tracking prevention measures. Those features have different levels of impact on web analytics, and that’s why it is important to stay updated with the latest industry news and trends.

Adobe Analytics allows you to monitor devices and operating system types. By setting up a health check workspace, you can easily see how those are shifting as products upgrade or if there is a sudden drop in traffic for one of them.

Sometimes, tracking prevention features can also identify tracking codes appended to URLs. It’s important to test your integrations and placements before enabling them, to ensure you can accurately report. Avoiding generic naming can also help avoid this issue.

Multiple tracking codes

An uncommon issue that I have seen in the past is adding multiple tracking codes to a URL, all with different purposes. If the syntax is not followed correctly, you can end up with a couple of concatenated tracking codes in Adobe Analytics, making it difficult to aggregate and analyze the data correctly. The rule is that all tracking codes and their values should be appended by using the ‘&’ symbol.

Conclusion

Navigating marketing channels and tracking codes can be complex, with numerous potential issues potentially compromising data accuracy. To maximize the value of your data:

• Adhere t o best practices for managing marketing channels
• Customize your setup to align with your business model
• Regularly audit your data and investigate anomalies

Key takeaways

1. Prioritize marketing channels based on investment and significance.
2. Adjust the visitor engagement time to accurately attribute first-touch channels.
3. Create detailed tracking codes to gain insights into campaign performance.
4. Regularly audit your data setup and validate campaign results across multiple sources.
5. Be aware of and address potential pitfalls, including missing tracking codes, bot traffic, privacy regulations, browser updates, and incorrect use of multiple tracking codes.

Implementing these practices enhances your ability to draw meaningful insights from your marketing channels.