2.3 How do tracking codes work? - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->We're going to explore a concept called tracking codes</v> and tracking codes is one of the ways that you can answer the question, where do your web visitors come from? So your analytics system can tell you which sites send you traffic. So you might be using Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, or maybe a different analytic system. But that analytics system all by itself can tell you which places on the web, your web visitors come from and you might think, well, that's all I need to know isn't it, not really. So it'll say for example, linkedin.com, but it doesn't really tell you which page or it doesn't really tell you what ad it came from. If that was an ad on LinkedIn. And I think you'd want to know that because if you're trying to track the return on investment for your advertising, you want to know that a certain ad is what actually sent the traffic to your site. Not what page had happened to be displayed on because you might not even know that your ad is being displayed on that page. If you bought it through an ad network. And so tracking codes are what connect the dots. So tracking codes, answer that question of where does your traffic come from? And so you use a tracking code to segment your metrics. In this case, visitors coming to the website by the tactics that drove them. So whether it was an ad on a certain social platform or a blog post that you syndicated or anything else, the tracking code might give you a way to tell you what marketing campaign drove the traffic to your website. And once your analytics system uses that tracking code to segment by the marketing campaign, not only can it segment the traffic, but it can segment everything else that visitor does, whether it's conversions or views of pages or anything else that that analytics system knows about that visitor, once it uses that tracking code, you can segment all of your data based on the tracking code. So how to tracking codes work? Well, they work with a link that you provide. So the place to use a tracking code is when you're putting a link off your website, if the links on your website, you don't need a tracking code. Cause your web analytics system can see that page. But if you have a link that's off your website, like an ad or like a syndicated blog post, your analytics system only sees the traffic on your websites, your analytics system can't see that page. It can't see your link. It can't see your ad. And so you use the tracking code to add it to the link that you put on that piece of content. So you have to control the content. So it's your blog posts that you syndicated. It's your video that you gave to another site to play. It's your ad that you paid for to be displayed on another site. All of them have a link that when people click it, it brings them to your site. And so you're going to put a tracking code on that link. So anytime you have an ad or other content, that's on someone else's website and your controlling it, your controlling what link they click on to come to your website, you can add a tracking code. Now there's plenty of links to your website you don't control. If someone out there writes an article and they just put a link in to a page on your site, you don't have any control over that. So you can't add a tracking code there, but that's okay. Because mostly what you want to know is which website did it come from? Which page did it come from? Whereas when you're syndicating content or when you're putting ads out there, you might have the same ad on hundreds of different pages. You might have the content on several different parts of a website. And so you really want to use the tracking code to tell you whether the money that you paid to get that content out there is really paying off. And so you want to know which content it was not necessarily where it was located. And so some systems use other names for tracking codes. So for example, Adobe Analytics calls them CIDs, campaign identifiers, and you can use whatever your web analytics system provides. So just work with your web analytics person, they'll help you figure out how in your organization you create and use tracking codes, because you want to make sure that you're using a unique tracking code. You wouldn't want to use the same tracking code as for another campaign because then all of those metrics will get mixed up together. So the purpose of the tracking code is to have a unique one for each campaign you do. Now, the way you use it in practice is in this example, suppose you had a page on a site and you want to know if your paid search campaign is attracting visitors. And so what you would do is you would use a different tracking code for Google than you do for Bing. even though it's the same ad, because you want to focus on how to track things at the lowest granularity. So your metrics are actually segmented from each other and that helps you make better decisions. And that's really the essence of tracking codes. If you can split the data by tracking codes, it helps you make better decisions and how to improve your marketing tactics.