Marketing Types
All marketing activities can be broadly split off into the following three types:
- Acquisition marketing: these are marketing channels that are targeted to new prospects and are generally not aware of your products or service at first. The marketing channels include non-branded search (both SEO and PPC), display advertising, affiliates, social media as well as partners or sponsorships.
- Brand marketing: these are marketing channels that are due to brand recognition either because of word of mouth or offline promotions. The marketing channels include branded search (both SEO and PPC), direct and possibly social media.
- Retention marketing: these are marketing channels of previous customers and/or subscribers. The main marketing channel is email though it can be mobile SMS or even social media.
Web analytics tools generally distinguish between paid and organic traffic by looking for an identifier that highlights that the traffic is paid and then assuming the rest is organic.
For example, if paid search engine traffic is not tagged as such paid, the analytics tool will see that search engine traffic as organic traffic.
For all URLs that require campaign tagging, there are two elements that need to be provided: Campaign name and Channel name.
- Paid Search: including conventional search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo as well as shopping search engines such as Kelkoo and PriceGrabber.
- Display: display ads placed on other sites. These range from simple images to rich media interfaces.
- Email: can be split into internal lists (such as a customer or subscriber database) and external lists.
- Affiliates: either through an affiliate marketing network or direct.
- Social Media: any traffic from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc. except for display ads from Facebook, Linkedin and other social media sites.
- Offline: any traffic from offline advertising such as TV, radio, print, billboards, etc.
Additional elements that would be tracked within the above marketing channels can include the following:
- Paid Search:
- Ad Group Name.
- Keyword.
- Display:
- Site name or Network name.
- Ad creative name: including the messaging, size and format.
- Placement or targeting type: what type of placement is being used (ex: Run of Site, Interstitial, etc) or the targeting type (ex: Women 45-55 interested in news, Men 18-34 interested in travel, etc).
- Email:
- List name: the target list name and type (i.e. Internal or External). For internal lists, specify the name of the segment being targeted (for example: UK leads, high value members, etc). For external lists, specify the name of the list provider.
- Email subject.
- Email template type.
- Affiliates:
- Affiliate type: direct or affiliate network name.
- Affiliate name.
- Social Media:
- Social media site name: such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, MySpace,
- If on Twitter, specify if Promoted Tweet or not and a hashtag if used.
- If on Facebook, specify the Facebook page name.
- Offline:
- Short URL or QR Code.
- Media placement: radio, TV, print, etc.
Want to see your traffic reports in Google Analytics split into the marketing channels defined above? You can either use the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder or you can download the Analytics Campaign Tagger Excel sheet.
