Tracking Click Performance

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Understanding click behavior is a key component for website optimization as well as a large benefit of Digital Analytics tagging. Understanding the key components in order to measure click behavior will help you gauge overall performance. Many clients using Recommendations desire more than just sales and conversion numbers, they also want to know click-through rate for each zone. Collecting click behavior is quite simple, but it's most beneficial to add this tracking up front. You do this through Site Promotions and Impressions tagging.

Site Promotions Tag

The site promotions tag can be used to track the performance of a link across multiple pages. Links are tracked by adding a cm_sp parameter to the URL query string. The cm_sp= parameter allows specification of Promotion Type, Promotion, and Link level information. The information is reported in hierarchical format by the Links within Promotion and Promotions within Promotion Type. Each of these three values is placed within the cm_sp= parameter, delimited by the string "-_-" (hyphen underscore hyphen). Spaces between works are represented by the string "%20". This follows the same convention as other marketing link tracking such as MMC.

For example:

http://www.client.com/product.asp?cm_sp=Recommendations-_-Product%20Pag…

Site Promotions report hierarchy:

1) Promotion Type: Recommendations

2) Promotion: Product Page

3) Link: PDPZ1

It's important that the same parameter values (promotion type, promotion, link) are used for the entire zone across your site, each recommendation should not have unique tracking values. This allows for reporting on the zone itself, not the individual recommendation placement or page.

Impressions

Collecting impressions is also necessary for tracking click through rate. It is important that only 1 impression throws per zone, to do this you will need to complete the following:

a. Disable auto impressions by using ({"cm_TrackImpressions:""});

b. Throw a single manual impression tag using the same tracking parameters as the cm_sp link for the zone. See Implementation Guide for more information

Once completed, each zone will report on clicks, impressions, clicking sessions, order sessions/clicking sessions and other great performance metrics. You can also see how Recommendations overall are performing using the Site Promotions report.

Tracking Recommendation clicking behavior will give you additional insight into zone performance and I recommend it to all clients. Happy tracking!

Thanks

Scarlett Hankey

IBM Digital Analytics Team

Want to learn more? Contact Scarlett at slowrie@us.ibm.com