Campaigns

In Netmonitor a campaign represent a marketing action that you took in order to promote your site. The campaign feature allows you to track visits directly resulting from this action.

If you are already familiar with link tagging, you can skip this section. Alternatively you can read the Beginners Guide to tracking paid traffic on our blog.

In order to track the traffic coming from a particular source, you need to a distinctive marker (a tag) to the link before posting it. Let's say, for example, that you want to send emails to potential customers with a link to mywebsite.com. In order to track how many visitors clicked on this particular link in this particular email, you can rewrite your link like so: mywebsite.com/?email_1. Now you know that the visitors which arrives to this page are the visitors who clicked on this particular link. You can then tell Netmonitor to track visits landing in a page containing the string ?email_1, and you'll have proper reports about this campaign. This process is called link tagging, and is very useful.

Let's continue with the example above: you are sending emails to potential customers. What if you have 2 links in this email: one in the main section and one in the footer for example, and you want to be able to differentiate them in order to see which position is the most efficient. They should be both counted as part of the same campaign (the emails), but still you should have a way to segment the results.

Meet the campaigns dimensions. You can add additional tags to URL that Netmonitor will use to segment the results. Netmonitor supports the standard dimensions: medium, source, term, and content, and it is compatible with the tags utm_medium, utm_source, utm_term and utm_content.

For example, if you decide to use the content dimension to differentiate the links, they will look like that:

• mywebsite.com/?email1&utm_content=main+link will be the link to add in the main section
• mywebsite.com/?email1&utm_content=footer+link will be the link to add in the footer

Keep in mind that you can use each dimension the way you want. There is no rules carved in stone about what dimension should be used for what. You organize and segment your campaigns the way you think is the best for your own business.

• Parameter: utm_medium

You can use the “medium” dimension to identify the medium of your campaign. For example “email” or “banner” or “print”, etc.

• Parameter: utm_source

You can use “source” to identify multiple things. It can be, for example, the source of traffic, i.e. which website your are publishing your campaign on. If you are sending emailing campaigns, you could also consider using it to identify which listing your where using.

• Parameter: utm_term

You can use this parameter if you want to identify to which keyword this campaign refers to.

• Parameter: utm_content

You can use this parameter to do A/B testing for example (two slightly different emails, part of the same campaign), or to differentiate different links inside the same email.

If you are familiar with Google Analytics (or other similar products), you'll be using the utm_campaign parameter. Netmonitor is fully compatible with it. When you create a campaign, a URL-friendly version of the campaign name is created (we call this the campaign “identifier”, or “slug”). You can use this as the value of the utm_campaign parameter to identify your campaign, in addition to the custom tag you might want to define.

For instance, if your campaign is called “Emails to potential customers”, the identifier will be “emails_to_potential_customers”, and Netmonitor will automatically assign to this campaign all the links that contains utm_campaign=emails_to_potential_customers.

The “custom tag” field is here for the cases when this is not enough, typically if you want to track a URL that contains something else than those standardized “utm_*” parameters (for instance, “gclid=”, ”?adwords”, and so on).

Enough with the theory, we made a really handy URL Builder tool to help you tag your links easily. Check it out: http://www.netmonitor.fi/url_builder/

The list shows all your campaigns with their associated metrics (number of visits, pages per visit, etc.).

The charts shows the number of visits during the all campaigns. Open-ended campaign (those without an end date set) will always be displayed until today.

Please note that in this section, the date picker has no effect (the time periods shown are determined by each campaign's settings).

You can view each dimension across all campaigns by clicking on the links: “All sources”, “All mediums”, “All terms” and “All contents'.

Please note that in when you enter the detailed section, the date picker has no effect (the time periods shown is determined by the campaign's start and end dates).

This page will show the results of the campaign. It is organized in multiple chapters.

• In Cost and revenue, you'll see the revenue of this campaign (see the tag options to know how to configure the tag to record the revenue of your website). If you set a cost in the settings of the campaign, you'll also see the return on investment. If this campaign has a cost, you'll also see the cost per click.
• In Impact on your traffic, you'll see how much this campaigns accounts for your website overall traffic.
• In Efficiency, you'll see the bounce rate and the conversions rate for every active goals.
• Summary shows all the number in a table.

With the subpages “By source”, “By support”, “By term” and “By content”, you are able to see the different dimensions of your campaign (if you are using them).

This page shows the evolution of the various metrics of your campaign.

Tips: you can try the guided tour “How to create a campaign?” by clicking on the “Guided tours” link in the menu.

To create a campaign, you need to enter the following values:

• A name
• The tag that you used in the URL to identify this particular campaign
• The start date of the campaign (that is, when Netmonitor will start monitoring it). It can be a date in the past, in which case Netmonitor will recalculate past values for you.
• The end date is optional. You can enter if you know already when will your campaign end, or you can leave it empty and close the campaign once you're done with it.
• The cost is also optional. If you enter it, Netmonitor will be able to calculate the return on investment, the cost per click and other metrics. You can leave it empty and enter it later, or you can enter “0” to disable cost calculation.

You can update a campaign at any time. The new results will appears within a couple of minutes.

When you delete a campaign, all its results will be deleted.