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WHY MY ADOBE ANALYTICS CAMPAIGN TRACKING DOESN’T WORK?
There is a common issue that the numbers in Adobe Analytics campaign report are much lower than the numbers shown by your campaign tools or affiliate partners. A flawed campaign tracking makes it harder to give a deeper analysis of your campaign success.
Here I will introduce the most common 5 mistakes, from very non-technical to slightly technical ones, so you can quickly check out the potential reasons why your campaign tracking didn’t work.
Mistake 1: Forgot to set the right campaign tracking URL in your email / newsletter or any link that directs to your landing page.
I know it sounds too basic! However, we saw this mistake in many cases!
It is common that the busy marketer needs to manage several campaigns at the same time. Unlike text or hero banners, links are “invisible”, which are usually forgotten to be placed correctly after thousands of changes .
Our client once rolled out a newsletter campaign but struggled with the unexpected low numbers in campaign reports. However, the tracking on website worked well, the tracking parameter was captured during the testing as well.
So what went wrong?
After reviewing, we found that several links in the newsletter were without tracking parameter! We would never know whether the recipient would click the banner at first glance or click the CTA button after reading through the newsletter.
Besides, we also found that the tracking URL was not updated, i.e. still the one of old campaign, in other cases.
“Double check” is always good to ensure that all the buttons or links in your campaigns have the right tracking URLs!
Mistake 2: Wrong setting of the consent management tool, which disables the analytics tool on your website.
It is straightforward that if the analytics tool is disabled, no data will be tracked.
After GDPR and ePrivacy-Policy were announced, it is required for website owners to ask consent from their users. However, if the consent management tool is not well set up, it will probably lead to a dramatic decrease of the analytics numbers in general. With a well-designed consent banner, it can help you get more opt-in for analytics.
Your Analytics numbers drops a lot after launching consent management tool?Or are you planning to have consent management tool and want to ensure that everything goes smoothly? We also provide support in this topic!
Learn More About Privacy & Consent Management
Mistake 3: Tracking link isn’t structured correctly.
If you just google campaign URL builder and use it or the link provided by Facebook — then I need to tell you that the URL probably won’t be tracked in Adobe Analytics!
So what is the difference between Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics Campaign tracking URL?
Unlike Google Analytics that uses five dimensions for campaign tracking (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_campaign), Adobe Analytics has only one dimension / Campaign ID, s.campaign variable.
To capture the variable value, cid is usually used, since it is in the default setting from Adobe.
Here is the example in Adobe Analytics official document by using a default method s.Util.getQueryParam() in AppMeasurement :
// Collect the cid query string parameter value from the URL
// https://example.com?cid=abc123
s.campaign = s.Util.getQueryParam(“cid”);
So with a tracking URL example.com?cid=abc123 , the campaign name that captured in your Adobe Analytics report will be “abc123”.
Let’s assume that your IT or agency follows the official document to implement Adobe Analytics AppMeasurement. Then you need to build your tracking URL with cid – not CID, nor utm. We saw a case that the URL is misbuilt with uppercase (CID) instead of the lowercase (cid), so Adobe Analytics couldn’t identify the campaign name.
If you already spread the campaign with CID instead of cid, how can you solve it? Don’t worry, ask your IT/agency to update the AppMeasurement or simply populate the variable using processing rules.
Mistake 4: cid getting stripped from URL by redirects before hitting your site
Actually, it is not your fault. And it is not an Adobe Analytics specific issue, it can happen in Google Analytics cases.
Redirects can cause the browser to blank out the true referring URL. Please check the campaign URL again, whether it leads to a redirect
For example, please avoid below case:
redirecting abc.com/?cid=trackingcode1&ecid=123456 to abc.com/2020MidSale
The cid query string will not be recorded but only the landing URL!
The most common (and easiest) way is to add the cid to the final URL after the redirect. That is, you should show this abc.com/2020MidSale and then redirect it to the one with cid.
Another scenario is that if you have a redirect within your web aseest, e.g. abc.com/service to abcservice.io, build the tracking URL with the domain of the landing page to avoid redirects.
Mistake 5: Didn’t update the Classification, that makes advanced analysis harder.
By avoiding mistakes 1 to 4, you can already expect stable tracking results in your report.
However, if you plan to include all the information in your tracking code (channel, campaign version, button….etc.) having a solid, defined Classification in advance, you will appreciate yourself in the future.
As I mentioned earlier in Mistake 3, Adobe Analytics was designed to use one dimension. However, you can actually define the rule to have the 5 dimensions that Google Analytics has. You can even include more than 5 dimensions — you just need to update the Classification Rule , it is even more flexible! So you can customize the report based on your needs.
Here I will not dive into details how to modify the Classification but the brief workflow is as below:
- Go to the Classification Rule Builder and then add a new rule.
- Use RegEx to parse out parameters by using the “:” as a separator.
- Test classifications and verify that everything is working correctly.
If you are interested in how to implement, I would suggest to read the Adobe official articles.
If you and your team are familiar with UTM and want to stay with it, here I found an interesting blog article to tell you how to apply UTM with Adobe Analytics.
Conclusion
If you don’t find the above 5 mistakes in your campaign tracking setting, however, the tracking just doesn’t work, the reason could be various.
If you look for a partner to investigate the reason or want someone else to take care of this for you, we, as an Adobe Partner, are glad to support you!
Click below button to see our service scope for Web Analytics!