Urchin Campaign Tracking Module

Last Updated: 2/27/2004

The screen below is the Campaign Tracking Module's Overview, which gives you an idea of how successful your campaigns are within a specified time period. The campaign tracking on the Search Engine Roundtable Weblog is not set up to work with the e-commerce module. If it were, there would be information on sales conversion rates, average response value, return on investment and overall transactions as well as revenue and cost figures. The report below gives you a summary and overview of what is contained within the module.

The next screen is named "Goal Results." Here you have the ability to track how successful you are in accomplishing your goals on your Web site. A goal can be a click, a form submission, a procedure or something else. In my example, I set a goal to be each time someone clicked on the comments link in the blog. By clicking on the arrow to the left of the goal, you can see which sources of traffic bring you to the leading amount of goal completions. This figure gives you the ability to treat one traffic source with more care then another traffic source, or to supplement the word "care" with "dollars".

I will now venture to the "Lead Sources" section of the CTM and click on "Acquisition". You will see that each section within the CTM has subsections of acquisition, quality, conversion and cost breakdown. Each of these sections provides a different look at the data, helping you make the most informed decisions about your traffic. The acquisition subsection of Lead Sources gives you a break down of lead source by click, impressions, new leads, click through rates and percentage of new leads. You can then click on the information to break down the details even further by Lead Source.

The "Quality" subsection details the information listed by Lead Source but provides clicks, pageviews, sessions, depth and a loyalty factor. Loyalty measures visitor interest by calculating the average number sessions per visitor (per click). The more visitors return to your site, the higher the loyalty factor. Loyalty is calculated as Sessions divided by Clicks. These figures demonstrate to you the quality of the lead sources.

The "Conversion" subsection here shows the conversion in terms of goal conversions. By viewing this chart I can see that the Google organic Lead Source converts at 4.5% whereas the RustyBrick lead source has zero goal conversions. This information is used to see which Lead Sources you should allocate your marketing budget to. If the e-commerce module was turned on for this site, you would see transaction numbers and sales conversion percentages.

The last subsection "Cost Breakdown" does not have any information for a non-e-commerce site. If the e-commerce module were on, this section would enable you a look at the return on investment for those lead sources. The columns would contain the number of clicks, revenue, cost, ROI and average value, which is the average revenue per click and is calculated as Revenue divided by Clicks.

"Keyword Analysis" is the next main section within the "Campaign Tracking Module" and it gives you the data necessary to track your keyword success by search engine. In the example below displaying the acquisition, you can see Google provided 66 clicks whereas Yahoo provided only 8 clicks. Of the Google clicks, only 73% of those were new clicks whereas a 100% of Yahoo's clicks were unique.

You can then click on the arrow on the left side of the search engine and see which keywords drove the traffic to your site.

Skipping through some of the subsections of the screens, I will now show you an example of the keyword comparison charts. In the chart here, you will see the keywords within the quality view. The "Keyword Comparison" report gives you a picture of which keywords are driving traffic to your site. You can drill down on the keyword to see which search engines are providing that traffic. It basically gives you a different top level view then the previous "Keyword Analysis" report.

The "Campaign Comparison" gives you a break down of your campaigns and how each individual campaign is doing. In the example here, I have three campaigns, referral, organic and direct. I recently ran an advertisement for another site in an email newsletter. I was able, with Urchin, to track the number of click-throughs down to the goal completion and transaction level. This level of detail gives you the required data to make informed decisions on your Web sites marketing campaigns.

The final chart in this section is the "Latency" reports. This report gives you the ability to see how much time remains to reach a goal or how many sessions left to reach a goal. In the example below, I have selected the sessions to goal chart, which tells me the number of sessions an individual user takes to reach a single goal on the blog. If the e-commerce module were on, it would give you "time to transaction" and "sessions to transaction" information as well.

I would also like to mention that this is an extremely useful module, which gives you the ability to test certain campaigns with the "Content (A/B) Testing" section. For example this gives you the ability to see if text based ads work better or if graphical ads work better. In addition you can see "Click Fraud" reports and report those to your Pay Per Click providers and much more.

SEO's Wish List to Urchin Developers & Web Analytics Companies »

Urchin 5.5 - Web Analytics Product Review Article Contents

- Overview of Important Web Analytic Features for the SEO
- Detailed Review of Urchin 5.5 and Campaign Tracking Module
   - Administrative Configuration
   - Reporting Review
   - Campaign Tracking Module
- SEO's Wish List to Urchin Developers & Web Analytics Companies
- Concept of Goal Based Funnel Analysis
- Web Analytics Article Wrap Up

- Back to SEO Articles

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