IBM Support

Hidden Gems – Dude, where's my campaign?

Technical Blog Post


Abstract

Hidden Gems – Dude, where's my campaign?

Body

Congratulations, your new campaign has gone live after months of planning. All that hard work you put into your digital marketing strategy is finally about to pay off and you eagerly anticipate some amazing results along with the accolades and beefy pay raise from your boss. The next morning you log into Digital Analytics and go straight to the marketing programs report. But wait, what's this? No data, how can there be no data?? Before you hit the PANIC button take a moment to check out this week's hidden gem, the Invalid Marketing Programs report.

Located under Manage > Marketing > Invalid Marketing Programs, this report is one that will save your bacon time after time. The top causes of missing data in your Marketing Programs report are missing elements and malformed parameters of the cm_mmc parameter. Further reading on MMC links.

I've taken a couple of real world examples to demonstrate this point in the following screenshots. Let's step through the problems.

1. No default value was used between the delimiters. Even if you don't have a need for all four levels you still need to put a default value in there such as "NA" for Not Applicable.

2. In the next example they have used all four values however the delimiter before the last value is _- instead of -_-

image

3. The 3rd example uses an extra delimiter at the end. If the intention here was to have another value passed you would need to use one of your 50 extra attributes which are appended with &cm_mmca1=value1&cm_mmca2=value2 etc. Check out the Knowledge Base for a complete example of additional marketing parameters.

4. This example for Goolge SEM Mobile only has the vendor and is missing the other three values. If you didn't want to capture any other data then you can use the NA as a default e.g. cm_mmc=googlesemmobile-_-NA-_-NA-_-NA

5.In the final example for Affiliates the first delimiter is missing a dash i.e. they have -_ instead of -_-

image

These are all very simple mistakes to make but can really cause havoc with the accuracy of your marketing campaign tracking because without the right tracking parameters the data is hard to recover. Recovery options would include looking at the referring sites report or created and Explore report with the full referring URL but taking a few preventative measures can save this heartache.

I highly recommend three preventative measures in combating this problem.

  1. Create a daily email report of the Invalid Marketing Programs. If you have agencies creating the MMC parameters on your behalf make sure they are also included on the recipients list and educate them on how to properly form the parameters. At least this way you will only ever lose one day of data by addressing the issues as soon as you see a problem in the report instead of potentially weeks.image
  2. Use the Marketing Code Generator which will pick up these errors before you ever put the campaign live. This is available for download from Manage > Marketing > Tracking Codes. There is a column in the output file called Error which will tell you the problem after you've processed your file.
  3. Try out your campaign URLs in a test environment first and check the results in your test client ID. If you don't have a test client ID please contact our support team at [email protected] to have one created.

imageOf course it's not just the Marketing Programs that might be invalid, there are also Site Promotions and Real Estate parameters which both have reports for invalid parameters. I highly recommend setting up a daily email on these and you can find them under the Marketing reports as shown here.

That's it for this week's Hidden Gems, I hope you've all had a great break over the festive period. Next week I'll be discussing a little house keeping topic on server calls to help you understand what proportion of server calls are used by each tag type and help you to avoid overage situations.

Thanks,

Aidan

Further reading…

-IBM Digital Analytics Team

Curious about other presentations we've done?Click here and check under Connect With The Experts: Support Technical Exchange (STE) Replays

If you haven't visited the IBM Digital Analytics blog before, click here:IBM Digital Analytics Blog, then bookmark

If you're interested in getting a demo of IBM Digital Analytics click here:About IBM Digital Analytics

[{"Business Unit":{"code":"BU055","label":"Cognitive Applications"},"Product":{"code":"SSPG9M","label":"IBM Digital Analytics"},"Component":"","Platform":[{"code":"PF025","label":"Platform Independent"}],"Version":"","Edition":"","Line of Business":{"code":"","label":""}}]

UID

ibm11122273