Chapter 10

Tag a campaign to see it in reports

By Anna Tomalik

Whenever you run an ad campaign, be it a newsletter, banner ad, social media ad or in-app ad, you probably want to know how it performs. Which creative attracts the most people? Which source refers the most traffic?

Using Analytics and campaign report, you can track the traffic from your campaigns and see how they are doing. To collect information about a campaign you need to add parameters to its destination URL. For example, if you’re running a winter campaign through a pop-up ad on your website, newsletter, Google Ads and Facebook Ads, you can tag the URL for each of these campaigns. Every time somebody clicks a tagged link, the parameters that you’ve added will be sent to Analytics and data about the campaign will be available in the campaign report.

Parameters that you can add

There are six parameters you can add to your URLs:

  • pk_campaign: The name for a campaign. For example, Winter_Promo.
  • pk_source: It helps you identify the advertiser, website, publication and more. For example, Newsletter, Facebook, Google.
  • pk_medium: It describes the medium used for advertising. For example, CPC, banner, sponsored_post.
  • pk_keyword: It helps you identify paid search keywords. For example, free_bank_account.
  • pk_content: It is used to separate similar content within the same ad. For example, if you have a newsletter with two call-to-action buttons, you can tag each link for each button with a different pk_content parameter, and see which version is working better.
  • pk_cid: It helps you differentiate campaigns using an ID number. For example, if you are using two similar creatives for Facebook, and want to see which one performs better, you can tag them with a different pk_cid parameter.

When you add parameters to a URL, you should always use the pk_campaign parameter. Other parameters are optional, and you can add them if you want to.

How to add parameters

You can add parameters manually, or you can use the Piwik PRO URL Builder.

For example, if Clear Bank was running a Winter Promo campaign on Facebook using a sponsored post, they would use the following parameters:

  • pk_campaign: Winter_Promo
  • pk_source: Facebook
  • pk_medium: Sponsored_Post

If they used these parameters, the campaign URL would look like this:

https://clearbank.com?pk_campaign=Winter_Promo&pk_source=Facebook& pk_medium=Sponsored_Post

View data in the campaign report

Once you set up your campaigns, you can see data related to these ads in the campaign report.

To see the campaign report, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Menu > Analytics.
  2. Navigate to Reports.
  3. On the left, click Campaigns.
    Campaign report in Piwik PRO

This report will show you data grouped in five categories based on parameters used for tagging campaigns:

  •  Campaigns
  •  Source / medium
  •  Keywords
  •  Contents
  •  Campaign ID

In the report you will see the following metrics:

  • Visitors: The number of unique visitors. Every visitor is counted once, even if they visit the website many times during the day. Read more
  • Sessions: The number of sessions performed by visitors. A session starts with the first event and ends 30 minutes after the last event performed in that session. Read more
  • Bounce rate: The percentage of sessions in which visitors only viewed one page and didn’t proceed to another page, goal conversion or order. Bounce rate = Bounces / Sessions * 100%. Read more
  • Goal conversion rate: The percentage of sessions in which visitors completed a goal. Goal conversion rate = Sessions with a completed goal / Sessions * 100%. (You need to set goals to collect this data.)
  • Sum of goal revenue: The amount of revenue generated by a goal. (You need to set goals to collect this data.)

By looking at the number of visits coming from each campaign, you will be able to quickly tell how they perform. Then you might decide to invest more in leading creatives or sources, and less in not-so-good ones.