This article will provide an in-depth look at the Campaign Analysis Dashboard in Insights 360, and provide guidance on how to use the dashboard to analyze the performance of your digital marketing campaigns powered by Where to Buy.
What is a Campaign?
In PriceSpider terms, a “Campaign” is a digital marketing effort put forth by a brand to drive awareness, traffic, and sales to their owned websites, landing pages, or partner retailers.
In Insights 360, Campaigns are represented by a combination of tracking parameters and values passed to the WTB or included in a direct-to-retailer tracking link. These usually take the form of URL parameters such as utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign. PriceSpider combines the values into a “Campaign ID” which you’ll see in the Insights 360 dashboards.
Here’s an example to demonstrate the process:
Take the following landing page URL:
https://www.brand.com/where-to-buy?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=winter-solstice-7
The Campaign Parameters and their values are:
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utm_source = facebook
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utm_medium = social
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utm_campaign = winter-solstice-7
And the resulting “Campaign ID” would be: facebook,social,winter-solstice-7
Now, before diving into the reports…
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For more information on industry standard Campaign Parameters and their uses, we recommend checking out Google’s Campaign URL Builder - this is an easy-to-use sandbox where you can create your own campaign URLs!
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- Note - please do not use Google’s tool to construct direct-to-retailer tracking links. If you do, PriceSpider will not be able to track the performance of those links! Please follow the process outlined here for getting the tracking links you need.
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Please review the Campaign Parameters that you have registered in WTB.
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Here’s a handy guide to help you through this process
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To get the most out of Insights 360’s reporting, we recommend familiarizing yourself with your brand’s campaign naming strategy. Each brand’s naming conventions for their campaigns are unique, and consistent naming will make measuring campaign performance much easier!
Now that you’re prepared... onwards!
The Campaign Analysis Dashboard
The dashboard is broken down into few key sections we’ll cover in detail:
- Filters
- KPIs
- Campaign Timeline
- Leaderboards
- Campaign Details
Filters
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Campaign ID is a new filter specifically made for this dashboard. There are two main reasons why you’ll want to use this filter:
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Objective 1: track the performance of a single Campaign
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Set the Campaign ID filter to ‘is’ mode and start typing the name of your Campaign ID and select from the resulting list once you find the desired Campaign
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If you know the full Campaign ID you would like to filter on (hint: you can copy the full Campaign ID from the data table at the bottom of the dashboard!) you can set the Campaign ID filter to ‘matches (advanced)’ mode, type in a set of quotation marks, and then paste in the Campaign ID.
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Objective 2: track the performance of ALL campaigns for a given platform, medium, or strategy
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Set the Campaign ID filter to ‘contains’ mode and enter the keyword that represents the type of campaign you are looking to measure.
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For example, to see all Bing campaigns at once, you might set the filter to “contains: bing”
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- This is where it becomes critical to understand your brand’s campaign naming conventions! The more consistent your naming, the more effective this filtering strategy will be.
- For example, try and avoid using different variations of a platform’s name in your Campaigns! For example “FB”, “fb”, “Fb”, and “Facebook”.
- The Campaign ID filter is case-sensitive and will only match on what you enter as a keyword.
- This is where it becomes critical to understand your brand’s campaign naming conventions! The more consistent your naming, the more effective this filtering strategy will be.
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KPIs
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Campaign Analysis uses similar KPIs to the other dashboards, with a couple of exceptions:
- All of the KPIs here have an additional filter that excludes any traffic and sales that were not associated to a Campaign. Thus, if you compare the Sales KPI here to the Sales KPI on the Overview dashboard, the number here is generally going to be lower.
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Unique Campaigns:
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This is a counting metric that simply tracks how many unique Campaign IDs PriceSpider has tracked over the selected timeframe.
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If you see a 0% or ∅ in the Lead Conversion Rate field, this is likely because your selected Campaigns were all run through an ‘Ad’-type Module.
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Ad Modules are used exclusively in direct-to-retailer tracking links and do not collect Impressions, making it impossible to calculate a Lead Conversion Rate.
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This caveat applies to all of the dashboards but will be most noticeable in Campaign Analysis.
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Campaign Timeline
The Campaign Timeline's purpose is to identify the campaigns running at any given moment, along with their relative performance. The size of each bubble is based on how many Leads a given campaign has received on a particular date.
At quick glance, you can determine the following:
- Which campaigns are currently live
- When a given campaign ramped up and ramped down
- Which platforms are generating the most Shopper interest
- A campaign you expect to see that doesn't appear on the Timeline may be an indicator of a tracking setup issue, a budget allocation issue, or misaligned expectations with your media partner(s) regarding start dates or performance.
By hovering over any of the bubbles, you can see the CampaignID as well as the number of Leads it recorded on the selected date.
Pro tip - By applying a filter such as 'contains TikTok' you can track the top 20 campaigns currently running on any platform or using any strategy you wish to measure!
"Other Campaigns"
If you see a bubble labeled "Other Campaigns" on your Timeline, it means that you have more than 20 campaigns in flight over the selected timeframe. This bubble will display the total Leads for all campaigns outside the Top 20.
In most cases, it makes sense to simply click on the "Other Campaigns" bubble in the legend to hide it from the visualization, but if it's larger than the other bubbles it means that your traffic is evenly spread across many campaigns, and it's a good idea to apply more granular filters and zoom in on more specific areas of your campaign strategies.
Leaderboards
This section allows you to see at a glance which of your Sources, Mediums, and Campaigns are receiving the most activity over the selected timeframe.
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NOTE - if you are not using utm_source, utm_medium, or utm_campaign as your Campaign Parameters, one or more of these tiles may appear blank.
Campaign Details
This section provided detailed traffic and sales data for every campaign that recorded at least one Impression or Lead in the selected timeframe (up to a max of 5000 at once). Year over Year performance comparisons are also provided, where applicable.