Configuring Campaigns

ClickTracks can track your ad campaigns, and report the number of visitors from each, the cost of those visitors, and the total revenue they generated.

Organizing your ad campaigns

ClickTracks recognizes which visitors came from which ad campaigns by their landing page, that is, the page which they first arrived at on your website.

So in order to distinguish between your different campaigns, you must make sure that each campaign has a different landing page. The most convenient way to do this, and the way recommended by both Overture and Google, is to put extra parameters, called tracking parameters, on the end of the landing page URL.

For example, suppose that bobsfruitsite.com has several Google AdWords campaigns. Instead of making them all land at the home page, http://www.bobsfruitsite.com/, it would be better to make them each land at a page with distinctive parameters, for example http://www.bobsfruitsite.com/?source=google&campaign=1.

By ensuring that each campaign has unique tracking parameters, it is possible to know which visitor came from which campaign, and thus measure how well each campaign is performing. See Zen And The Art Of Tracking Parameters

Configuring your campaigns in ClickTracks

You can tell ClickTracks about your ad campaigns by selecting Configure Ad Campaigns from the Tools menu, or by clicking the icon in the Campaign Report. The Campaign Manager looks like this:

Depending which version of ClickTracks you have, there may be two tabs along the top of the Campaign Manager (Google and Overture) or there may be three tabs (Google, Overture and Other).

Google and Overture campaigns

ClickTracks reads Google and Overture campaigns directly from the .csv spreadsheets supplied by those companies. It calculates all the parameters for you, so that you don't have to configure anything yourself.

You can download the spreadsheets from the Google and Overture management consoles. You need to download the Ad Text Report ( then choose Summary Data ) from Google, and the Account Activity Detail spreadsheet (under the Reports tab) from Overture. Save the spreadsheet to disk, then click the Import button in the Campaign Manager to import the data directly into ClickTracks.

For the results to be accurate, you should make sure that the spreadsheet and ClickTracks are using the same date range. You can change the date range of the spreadsheet when you download it from Google or Overture. Alternatively, you can change the date range which ClickTracks is analyzing using the button on the toolbar.

Other campaigns

If you have a version of ClickTracks with the Other tab in the Campaign Manager, you can also configure your own campaigns from other search engines or partner sites. To add a single campaign, click the New button to create a new campaign. Then enter the data about your campaign into the fields in the table:

To import multiple campaigns, you will need to have a comma separated value (.csv) file with campaign data to be imported.  This file must be specifically

formatted to match the ClickTracks import requirements. The format of the file must be followed correctly or it will not import into the Campaign Manager.

The file must be in Unicode text format, NOT ANSI. Then the fields in the file should be setup as follows:

4.        On the sixth line you can begin your tab delimited data fields, with as many lines of data following this line        

* Depending on whether you enter "Avg CPC" or "Total Cost" in the fourth column of the .csv file, your campaign costs will be calculated accordingly.

You can also base your campaigns on the existence of specific cookies instead of on the destination URL.  In order to track campaigns by cookies, the "Destination URL" field should have date in the form: cookie:COOKIENAME=VALUE where COOKIENAME is the name of the cookie and VALUE is the value that indicates the specific campaign.  These are cases sensitive.

Landing page/tracking parameters

Each campaign is identified solely from the landing page and tracking parameters. Careful planning and selection of these parameters during your advertising planning will pay off when you later analyze the data in ClickTracks.

The landing page+tracking parameters you enter must match exactly the URL the user will click through,

A note about currencies

ClickTracks doesn't know anything about currencies or exchange rates. All campaign costs and revenue calculations are currency neutral - it's just a number. For US based users the reports will contain a $ sign for convenience though it's important to understand this does not mean ClickTracks can only work in US dollars. In fact ClickTracks has no preference for any currency. If you're using ClickTracks Pro for ROI calculations you must make sure both your costs and sales are defined in the same currency, since ClickTracks can't use exchange rates to convert from one currency to another. It doesn't matter what the currency you use is, as long as it's the same for both costs and sales.