You Ask, I Answer: Tracking Display Ads?

In today's episode, Chelsea asks, how do you organize and track which display ads you're running and where? Ah, well, the answer to that's Google Analytics. Specifically, Google Analytics UTM tracking codes are the best practice for tracking all kinds of ads, not just display ads. There's five kinds of UTM tracking codes. There's Medium, which is what is the thing, like in which in this case would be display.

There is source, which is typically where you put the vendor, whether it's a company like StackAdapt or Basis or Google Display Network, that would be the source. And then you have three more tags: campaign, content, and keyword. Campaign is the logical campaign cluster that an ad group belongs to. So if you're doing, say January coffee shop ads, that would be the campaign name that would go there. You would then for the content describe what it is in the ad that you're uh showing.

And then keyword, if you're doing uh any kind of uh SEM ad, the keyword would be the literal keyword of the ad. If you're not doing an SEM ad, then it would be uh another additional descriptor that could help you differentiate the content. The reason you do it this way is so that you can not only have a distinctive taxonomy for all your different advertising, but then you can actually see its impact inside Google Analytics and run proper attribution analysis. So, how do you keep track of all of that? Well, there's a couple different ways you can do it.

If you do it just uh with the the campaign content and keyword tags, you'll see that in Google Analytics under some of the campaign uh acquisition uh source campaigns. Uh however, if you're trying to keep it all straight in in advance of launching a campaign, simplest thing to do is put together a spreadsheet, right? Put together a Google Sheet so it's collaborative and multiple people can work on it, and have each of those columns filled out so that you can have medium source campaign content keyword. Once you've done that and you've got all that uh stuff inside of a spreadsheet, then it is relatively trivial uh to keep track of that within Google Analytics and see which campaigns, which content, which vendors are performing the best, right? Because if you remember you're using the the vendor name as that UTM source, you can see right inside most of the standard views inside of Google Analytics.

You can switch to source medium and see which source is giving you the highest amount of performance. That's also why it's less advisable to use a um you know some uh some kind of custom uh tracking codes, just to use what's built into Google Analytics, it's designed for exactly this purpose. So medium is display, and be sure to differentiate too. If you are working with different vendors that have different types of advertising, if you're doing SEM, it should be either CPC or PPC. Those are sort of the built-in channel definitions.

If you're doing display, do display. Uh, if you're doing native, you can put native in for the medium type, but then you're gonna need to uh declare it in the default channel grouping, so it will get tracked as other, and that's really bad. Um source is the vendor, campaign is the campaign, content is the descriptor of the ad itself. Uh, this is by the way, is very, very useful if you're doing you know many variations. If you have like 50 graphics that you're doing massive testing on, that uh UTM content is the great the best way to differentiate it.

And the keyword either for an additional descriptor or the uh or your actual keywords. One of the best things you can do to keep track of the performance of these things is actually don't try and do it in Google Analytics itself, do it in Google Data Studio. Google Data Studio is a lot more flexible about bringing in and manipulating the different fields. And uh with either native connectors or the different third-party community connectors, you can connect to many different ad systems directly so that you can see you know their data and then put it side by side with what Google Analytics sees. Uh, and that way you can make sure that A that your tracking is right, because if if the ad system says you got a million clicks, and Google Analytics says you get five, that didn't work out so well.

Uh and second, uh you can obviously get a holistic picture of everything that's going on. So Google Data Studio would be the preferred reporting mechanism to make sure that the ads are delivering some kind of performance. But for the actual governance, do that in Google Sheets. Now there are more advanced solutions if you want to get really fancy. Uh there's a great piece of software called Workfront that is a lot does marketing operations management.

It is substantially more expensive than a spreadsheet. Um but it does have things like governance and approval cycles and stuff. If that's something that your your shop needs to have in place, uh I would say 95% of the time, a spreadsheet's a good place to start, and then once you find it becomes unwieldy, then start looking at marketing operations, management, software. But until then, keep it simple. So, good question.

If you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.