Tracking campaigns

One of the most common techniques used to bring new traffic to a website are on‑line marketing campaigns. When attempting to determine if a campaign was cost‑effective or when measuring its exact results, simply tracking referring sites or URLs may not always provide sufficient data.

In these cases, you can use the campaign tracking support provided by Web analytics, which allows you to accurately monitor traffic generated by individual campaigns. Campaigns can include banners, marketing e‑mails or any other method used to distribute and present links to your website. In addition to logging the amount of visits, campaign tracking stores records of any important actions performed on the website by users who arrive as a result of a campaign.

How campaign tracking works

When a visitor arrives on the website through a campaign link, the system updates the given campaign's visit statistics and stores a cookie named Campaign in the user's browser. The Campaign cookie stores the name of the corresponding campaign tracking object as its value. Only one campaign may be assigned to a user at a given time and the current value is overwritten if the user returns to the site through a different campaign.

Until the cookie expires (the duration is 24 hours), any actions performed by the visitor that are defined as conversions will be logged as part of the statistics kept for the campaign. The system also records the currently active campaign among the details of any Activities that are logged for the visitor.

If the visitor registers on the website while the cookie is still valid, the system permanently stores the name of the currently active campaign in the settings of the new user account.  Administrators can view the value in Users -> edit a user -> Settings -> Campaign. This data field only serves to provide information about users and is not used to track activity on the website.

You can view the statistics and results of campaigns using reports in the web analytics interface.