Zen And The Art Of Tracking Parameters

Tracking parameters are the key to successful analysis of campaigns within ClickTracks. Everything about tracking conversions, PPC keywords and successfully associating purchases with the originating campaign depends on a unique URL that visitors arrive at when they click through. Since the URL must be unique it's impossible to construct a different physical page for each campaign - you'll quickly need a very large number of pages. Instead tracking parameters are added to existing URLs, like so :

www.bobsfruitsite.com/home.asp

becomes

www.bobsfruitsite.com/home.asp?source=google

or even

www.bobsfruitsite.com/home.asp?source=google&group=3&campaign=12

Rules of tracking parameters

•	A campaign in ClickTracks is defined by the tracking parameters on the landing URL, nothing more and nothing less.

•	If all your URLs share a common tracking parameter (like source=google) then by definition you have only one campaign in ClickTracks (but that campaign contains any number of keywords that are reported in the search engine report)

•	the value of the tracking parameter is as important as the name. source=google and source=overture are two different campaigns.

•	The page name and parameters are used in combination, this /?source=google and /page.html?source=google are two different campaigns. In ClickTracks Analyzer the domain is not considered part of the URL. In ClickTracks Pro it is.

Combining tracking parameters into one

Sometimes your campaign tracking is very detailed, as in

www.bobsfruitsite.com/home.asp?source=google&group=3&campaign=12

and yet it can be useful to treat this campaign as simply all Google visitors combined. In this case you would specify the campaign as simply :

source=google

When a campaign is specified as just a single parameter=value it's interpreted by ClickTracks to mean this parameter on any page, regardless of the presence or value of other parameters. In other words it's a convenient way to group together many different campaigns under a single tracking parameter.