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Marketers, paid / social, email traffic experts: Do you have any problems with the accuracy of your campaign data in analytics?

When buying traffic from any partner (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, or even intext or email companies like Miva, Adconion, etc.) there is one thing you supply to them that is uniquely yours: the destination URL. Social updates, tweets, and emails that contain links to our destination sites also contain URLs that we provide as the originators of those updates we're sharing with our customers. This URL contains the parameters (if you choose to include them) that make it possible to later analyze the performance of your campaigns and adgroups in analytics. Many times, even when we think we've provided URLs with parameters to our traffic partners, or in a Tweet or Facebook share, we don't sometimes see the results in Analytics. Please let me know how often you've seen this issue, and what impact it may be causing.

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Answers

Slaven Radic

Clarity Expert

It can be pretty common. It's different for different networks, some will over-report and some under-report. Google for example generally under-reports conversions, so we adjust for that on our end. Social buys generally over-report due to bots etc. It's definitely annoying but once you get your baseline metrics down you can better estimate your true costs and revenue.

Answered over 10 years ago

Sarah Brody

Digital Ads Expert | Former Marketer @ HubSpot

Analytics do tend to be faulty at times, so I'd recommend (without overcomplicating things too much) having more than one platform for tracking your analytics, if possible. I use both HubSpot's analytics tools and Salesforce reporting, and often compare the two sets of results to check them against each other. Generally, though, you should be able to spot drastic changes in reporting and know that it was either likely caused by a big shift in your marketing efforts, or else there may be a bug in the system. Always double check that you set up your tracking tokens correctly too.

Answered over 10 years ago

Sorin Amzu

Ex-stand-up comedian, current Digital Marketer

I've seen this before. Google Analytics is not perfect, may I recommend the likes of https://www.woopra.com, https://mixpanel.com/ and http://clicky.com/
The problem can arise when the parameters aren't able to pass through to the analytics solution - errors, cookies and such.
Are you experiencing large amounts of traffic that isn't correctly attributed or recorded?

Answered over 10 years ago

Joy Broto

🌎Harvard Certified Global Corporate Trainer🌍

Whatever digital marketing campaign you come up with, it surely starts with your website and boosting site traffic. If your marketing campaign is successful, you will see an increase in website traffic. Determining the source of your website traffic is crucial as you will easily find out which marketing channels are performing well, and which ones are not. If you notice that some of your marketing channels are not driving results, you can use this information to optimize your campaign and appeal to a wider audience. Paying awfully close attention to specific page views is just as important as tracking website traffic. Most marketing campaigns aim to guide the leads to the landing page. So, for the duration of your campaign, your landing page should see a significant spike in views. Such an approach will prove to be invaluable for your future marketing campaigns.
You can read more here: https://www.smartinsights.com/traffic-building-strategy/campaign-analytics/best-practices-measurement-analysis-marketing-campaign-data/
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath

Answered over 3 years ago