Leaving Money on the Table in Performance Marketing

There's an Analytics opportunity that’s leaving money on the table - Las Vegas style.

I grew up in Brookfield, a small town in Illinois where there was one candy shop. When I was five my Dad walked me there, and the clerk filled up a paper bag with jelly beans. I proudly walked back home, holding that bag with two hands to guard my treasure, and when I got home, there were only a few left in the bag. Some tiny hole let out one jelly bean at a time as we walked. Being five, it was the end of all good things.

There’s an unspoken huge money drain that happens when marketing campaigns aren’t visible to analytics, and nobody talks about it. It’s embarrassing, it’s messy, and it’s one of the simplest money making fixes for a business. It all has to do with keeping your jelly beans once you bought them.

In this case, the jelly beans represent performance marketing, and the bag with the hole is cruddy campaign URL tagging.

Paid traffic is a huge investment. Here are three ways that businesses consistently lose big money, and where their analytics are completely wrong.

1. Campaign URLs are not tagged at all
2. Tagging standards are not enforced, inconsistent, or wrong
3. Traffic partners mess up your campaign tags

What are campaign URL’s and Tagging?

Campaign URLs are the links that lead people who click on the paid internet ads you bought on Google, Bing, or other places,  or the social media links you included in a Tweet or Facebook post. A user clicks on one of these, and they go to your site.

There are things you put on those Campaign URLs called “parameters” which tell your analytics system how to understand that this bit of traffic is purposeful, such as being a visit from your “New Shoes for Valentines” campaign, vs just a generic visitor coming from some unknown wherever.

Campaign URL tags are the sets of parameters all taken together, and put onto the end of your URL, which is then provided to the paid traffic partner (e.g. Google), or shoved your Tweet. This whole URL is called a Landing Page URL, or Landing Page.

When Campaign URL tagging is correct, life is awesome. Your analytics data tells you wonderful things about the mega amounts of people coming from your Google ad and want to buy “Shoes for Valentines”.

When tagging is cruddy, life sucks and your analytics tells you half or less of the story or virtually none. Bad tagging is kindly referred to as an Attribution Problem.

Don't’ have bad tagging, lose your jelly beans and have an Attribution problem.

Some companies I've worked with (no names) pay in excess of $200 million / year on paid marketing, and call it Performance Marketing. When your analytics can’t track the keyword you bought then it’s pretty tough to know if making money. On average, I've seen this problem affect up to 10% of a company’s traffic when they think they are tagging successfully = a $40 mil/yr problem. Even in Vegas, that buys you High Roller status, except in this case, you’re losing.

Performance marketing is supposed to refer to good performance.

You’re leaving money on the table when there isn't good Campaign URL tagging, and in my experience, it usually goes undetected for months and that’s completely fixable.

For all the money spent with Google, Bing, Adconion, or whatever company where we buy marketing traffic, none of them care how you tag your URLs. It’s all good as long as we pay them. If you use a cool ad management platform like DoubleClick for Search or Kenshoo, you have a great platform to track your stuff. But, once again, nobody is at home and watching your house. Ad platforms and ad or bidding management software doesn't do anything to take care of ALL of your Campaign URLs, especially for traffic not bought from Google or Bing.

There is nobody watching: no one cares about your URLs except you. Why? Because it’s your problem.

4 Ways to Fix the jelly bean bag:

1. Create a set of Campaign URL tagging best practices and stick to it.

Google Analytics and Site Catalyst have tagging standards for URL parameters.  Your company may use both, so create a matrix in Excel to standardize what goes where and for what partner. That sounds kinky, but it isn't.

2. Assign someone as the owner of your tagging scheme.

This person is the Czar with absolute authority to tell anyone they’re tagging is kaput, whether for a single silly Tweet,or for the owner of the $500 million dollar performance marketing budget. This person also debugs problems with tagging, and makes sure new marketing people and campaigns do tagging according to plan.

3. Assign another someone to work with traffic partners, and get them to “fix it”

Traffic partners like Google and Bing don’t listen to this noise because they aren't causing the problems. The smaller companies are the culprits. MANY times I've seen them just refuse to do the tagging that I've laid down. That’s just not good poker... for them. Assign someone (maybe the Campaign Czar above) to remind these partners that you’re paying them for a service, and to please do what you told them to do. They usually will. Many times, it’s just a set of honest mistakes, or bad coding that they’ll gladly fix. They want to make money too.

4. Build or Buy a Campaign Management system that does your tracking for you.

Super important. Since there are over a hundred paid traffic partners out there in the US alone not counting dynamic duo of Google and Bing, there are a super huge amount of potential campaign URL tags. It’s a lot of debugging to do for hundreds of thousands of URLs and can make people lose their minds. Look for a Campaign Management solution that will allow you to create and store your URLs for ANY traffic partner, error check them, and store your stuff historically, as well as upload them to your hundred partners. There is only one I know of, and it’s under development by experienced people who worked their way through and conquered this big money drain problem.

* Watch for an update from me on a new solution for this problem in coming weeks.

Don’t drop your jelly beans on the ground; get a better bag.

This stuff is difficult only because it’s very exacting, but it’s not very technical. Think of it like running a tiny library, but each book makes you money if it gets returned. Don’t leave money on the poker table. Vegas always makes money, and Analytics was invented there by Ballys.