I’ve been off busy gathering lots of great data for my ongoing investigation into using Google Analytics and Sitecore Analytics side by side. (OK, I haven’t been writing for a while and that’s my excuse). Now I am just about ready to tackle the reporting side of my experiment. Before doing that, I realized that there’s a little bit of cleanup I needed to do to make sure I’m modeling a similar environment in both analytics systems. In my next set of articles, I’ll be evaluating GA reports against Sitecore’s Engagement Intelligence Analyzer reports for some typical expectations—page views, time spent on page, traffic sources, browsers and devices, etc. In addition to the typical, I will then try to highlight additional insight that each tool is able to provide (Sitecore profiles, traffic segmentation, conversion funnels, engagement plans).
As described in previous posts, I already have the Conversion (GA) / Goal (Sitecore) of “Download Launch Sitecore” set up in both systems. Today I will set up one last facet—a campaign. In follow up articles, I will use campaign codes to see the resulting traffic from this series of articles. I will call it “MarchBlogBlitz”. I will be shameless in my attempt to get you to download Launch Sitecore in every article, annoying you to the point where you just have to visit the site and click the download button. I want a spike in traffic, lots of conversions, and pretty reports. Goal defined, and thanks for your help. NOW GO DOWNLOAD LAUNCH SITECORE. (Of course, register or login first).
Welcome back.
First, the campaign in Sitecore:
We have a folder of campaigns (a campaign category) called “SE Driven Traffic”. Our team can use these campaigns to identify traffic sources (across channels) and we can have a little competition to see who on the Sales Engineering team can drive the most traffic to Launch Sitecore.
In the Marketing Center in Sitecore, I am able to easily insert a new Campaign in this category. My Campaign is called MarchBlogBlitz.
There are a few additional fields that we could fill out, but for now let’s just concern ourselves with the Campaign Link (which is already filled out for us). This is the query string that will tell Sitecore that incoming traffic is part of this new campaign. sc_camp is the default query string parameter that Sitecore uses, but this is technically configurable. The GUID after the equals sign can also be changed, but for my purposes I’m going to leave it as is. In fact, my shameless attempts at sending you to Launch Sitecore are already using this Campaign ID.
One REALLY interesting thing here is that we could very easily add a Visitor to an Engagement Plan state. If I took one small additional step, I could have a very simple and nice Engagement Plan in Sitecore that allows me to watch a Campaign Visitor as he progresses through some states towards my end goal of DOWNLOADING LAUNCH SITECORE. (Something for the next campaign and experiment).
So off to Google. Google allows you to define any number of custom campaigns (this is separate from the money making AdWords feature). Defining a campaign is as simple as adding some predefined query string parameter attributes within your traffic source links. Google has a handy tool to create your URLs based on these attributes. For mine, I am including only those that are required (there are many to fully organize your campaigns):
Done. The resultant URL from Google is: http://www.launchsitecore.net/?utm_source=blogspot&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=MarchBlogBlitz, which I will use everywhere. Of course, I will add additional query string parameter from Sitecore (sc_camp=E8D2CAF7FDAB4383A473E350F2FA81B3) and I’m off to the races with my comparison. NOW GO DOWNLOAD LAUNCH SITECORE SO I CAN CREATE SOME COOL REPORTS.
Thanks.
