Campaign Tracking

Overview

Campaign tracking in Woopra allows you to monitor and measure the effectiveness of your various campaigns. Campaigns are essentially custom event properties of your landing pageview event and can be tracked the same way as any other property.

However, to simplify the process for tracking campaigns, the Woopra script is designed to read specified tags from your URL and automatically add them as custom event properties to the landing pageview event.

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Use UTM tags for any incoming links to your site

Using UTM tags will be much more accurate than using referrer types. Please see our section on Why Referer Tracking can be Inaccurate.

How it Works

Woopra’s campaign tracking works by identifying key tags stored in the URLs of your campaign landing pages. Normally when a user clicks a link to your site, they just go to:

http://www.yourwebsite.com

The problem with this is it doesn’t really tell you or Woopra much about how the user got to your site. Campaign tracking works by appending information to the end of the link so that Woopra can see which campaign the user clicked on to get to your site. These pieces of information look like:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/?woo_campaign=webinar

When Woopra sees this information, it automatically categorizes that activity with the campaign named “webinar”. There are five tags that Woopra tracks. Three of them are critical and should be used on all ad traffic: campaign name, source, and medium.

Example URL

Below, you will find an example campaign URL with Woopra tags. This URL represents a banner add on CNN.com with campaign name “promo”.

http://www.yourwebsite.com/?woo_campaign=promo&woo_source=cnn&woo_medium=web&woo_content=banner

In this example:

  • Campaign name is “promo”
  • Campaign source is “CNN”
  • Campaign medium is “web”
  • Campaign content is “banner”

Supported URL Tags

The “woo” tags below can be used to automatically send campaign information as custom event properties to Woopra.

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Note: you may use utm instead of _woo _tags in order to be compatible with your GA tags.

  1. woo_campaign: This will become custom event property “campaign_name” in Woopra.
  • This is the name of the campaign. Each campaign needs a unique name. Names can vary from a time period like “June” all the way to a product slogan or announcement title.
  1. woo_source: This will become custom event property “campaign_source” in Woopra.
  • Campaign Source is where the ad was displayed. If the ad was displayed on Citysearch, this value would be Citysearch. If the ad was on Google, then it would be Google.
  1. woo_medium: This will become custom event property “campaign_medium” in Woopra.
  • Campaign Medium is the type of ad that was displayed. For example, this could be a banner ad, email, or even a tweet.
  1. woo_content: This will become custom event property “campaign_content” in Woopra.
  • Campaign Content is used to distinguish two very similar ads. For example, if you had a banner ad placed at the top of a page and a banner ad placed along the side, you would want to be able to distinguish between them when analyzing in order to determine which location on the web page was more effective. You could use “topbanner” and “rightsidebanner” to designate each.
  1. woo_term:This will become custom event property “campaign_term” in Woopra.
    • Campaign Term can be used to list out the terms purchased for the ad. This is usually specific to Google Adwords.

Note: If you have different tags outside of those listed above, you can manually adapt those tags to the script by populating the campaign properties programmatically.

Using Campaigns Throughout Woopra

Since these tags are really just properties of your landing pageview event, you will be able to use them throughout Woopra just as you would any other property. They may be used:

  • To apply segmentation in Woopra’s analytics reports (e.g. segment a Journey report by all people who came from a campaign with the source “CNN.com”).
  • As a step in the Journey (e.g. the first step is set up as all users who came from the campaign with the medium “Web”).
  • As a constraint in the “Compare By” section of Trends Reports (e.g. you can compare the engagement of users who came from your Facebook campaign vs the users who came from Google AdWords).
  • As an action in the Retention report (e.g. the initial action’s constraint is all users who came from a campaign with the name “promo”).
  • As a Trigger (e.g. trigger email to customer whenever someone arrives from campaign with the campaign source “CNN.com”).

Tag URLs With Users Identification Properties

Woopra supports the ability to tag urls to identify customers when they land on your website. If you’re sharing links through private channels like emails, you can append some extra attributes to the URL that identify the person. In order to do so, you should use the_ wv__ prefixed attribute. The example below shows you how you can build a URL that automatically identifies the person on Woopra as soon as they click on that link and land on your website:

http://mybusiness.com/[email protected]&wv_name=John+Doe

The URL above will add the name and email properties to the user's Customer Profile, identify them, and merge their new profile with their old previous visits if they ever had any.

This is a great way to manage your email marketing leads and keep your data as accurate as possible.

Hide campaign properties from URL

When the user lands on your website, you may want to hide the campaign properties from the URL. Woopra uses HTML5 pushState to rebuild the URL by removing the campaign properties.

To activate this feature, you must add the option hide_campaign: true to the config function in your Woopra JavaScript Tracking Code.

Pixel Tracking For Emails

This might require some development experience but you can use pixel tracking in emails to track open rates. For more information on how to set this up, visit our Advanced Tracking documentation.

Additional Reading

Still have questions? Learn more in our blog post, "What are UTM Parameters and how to use Them?" and "Campaign and Referrer Data. What's the difference?."