Measure Results With Tracking Parameters

The first post in a planned series by new Contributor “Chris Bryce”:http://www.onedegree.ca/category/chris-bryce called Analytics for Marketers.
It’s likely that you are tracking ‘open’ and ‘click’ rates _from_ your e-mail campaigns and many of you are generating similar reports _from_ PPC(Pay Per Click) and banner advertising.
Do you ever wonder what those people ‘clicking’ actually _do_ once they get to your site?
There is any easy way to track this behavior. By simply adding tracking parameters into all the urls you place in your e-mail campaigns, PPC links, banners, and any other links that refer back to your site (and I even mean those html links in the bottom of your Outlook template).
A tracking parameter is a unique bit of code that goes at the end of the url that you include in your links.
For example: A recent e-mail communication that my company Dotfusion managed for “MTV”:http://www.mtv.ca has links back to various programming landing pages within the MTV Channel Site.

In order to segment site visitors and measure the activity of a subscriber who is referred from a link in the MTV e-mail, we added the following code to the link url:
‘c_src=email&c_des0714’
‘c_src=’ is the parameter for the campaign source, in this case, e-mail. It could be ‘banner’ or ‘outlook’.
‘c_des=’ is the description of the campaign, in this case the date. It could be ‘chrisbryce’ if we use the Outlook example. This would tell us exactly who was referred to our site by clicking on my Outlook footer.
This practice gives Dotfusion the ability to not only segment site visitors by referring campaign, but allows us to report to our client the click paths for this segment and to track conversion and ROI from their unique campaigns.

More on ROI conversion tracking in the next installment.
Bottom Line: Simply include url parameters in all referring links to better understand your campaign performance.