Campaign Tracking: A Brief Guide (PLUS 5 Metrics to Start)

Marketers don’t know customers as well as they think.

Case in point: this software company had to pivot its messaging after discovering an untapped pain point halfway through a campaign.

Campaign tracking identifies opportunities before it’s too late. Without it, you cannot know which specific channel, campaign, and content performs best or poorly—let alone drive sales.

This guide explains why you should track your ad campaigns and how to automate them, along with five metrics to get started.

What is an Ad Campaign in Marketing? (Plus Dissecting What The Random Text Codes Mean)
Why Marketers Use Ads to Promote & Sell… When There Are Cheaper Alternatives
Top 5 KPIs and Metrics to Measure in Ad Campaigns
Automatically Track Ad Campaign KPIs and Metrics with DashThis
Automate Your Campaign Tracking with DashThis Today!

What is an Ad Campaign in Marketing? (Plus Dissecting What Those Random Text Codes Mean)

An ad campaign is a series of paid ads that promote a product, service, or business.

There are three types of campaigns:

Awareness: Brand awareness, reach, video views
Consideration: Clicks, engagement, lead generation
Conversion: website conversions (e.g., sales, trials)

Whether you’re driving views for a product demo video on YouTube or generating leads for a SaaS tool on LinkedIn, managing campaign tracking data can get overwhelming fast.

That’s where campaign parameters come in.

These strings of text, placed at the end of a website URL address, tell you the origin of a click, simplifying campaign tracking and identifying top-performing ads easily.

Here’s how a typical campaign URL looks:

https://contentkapow.com?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=paid&utm_term=Freelance+B2B+Saas+Writer

Right away, we know the click comes from a user performing a search query: “freelance B2B SaaS writer”. If we see a lot of clicks from this source, we can deduce that it’s working and work on optimizing the website to drive more conversions.

But first, let’s unpack what these UTM parameters mean:

Campaign URL: Full website URL [e.g., https://dashthis.com]
Campaign Medium (utm_medium): Core marketing channel [e.g., paid, email, social]
Campaign Source (utm_source): The referral [e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn]
Campaign ID (utm_id): Ad campaign ID [e.g., abc.234]
Campaign Name (utm_campaign): Name of specific campaign [e.g., product_launch]
Campaign Term (utm_ term): Paid keywords [e.g., marketing+automation]
Campaign Content (utm_content): Different ads or links that direct to the same URL

The first three parameters are mandatory while the remaining are optional.

You can use a URL builder (like this one here) to piece together these parameters instead of manually piecing them together. Here’s how it looks when we input (1) dashthis.com, (2) Paid, and (3) Facebook in the URL builder:

3 reasons why you’ll want to track your ad campaigns

Let’s make sure we’re on the same page on the importance of tracking.

(i) IDENTIFY TOP-PERFORMERS (ADS, MESSAGING, CHANNELS, AND MORE)

As marketers, it’s our job to spot opportunities before it’s too late—tracking ad campaigns achieves that.

When JTB Studios ran a social media campaign for a new project management tool, a horde of users left comments.

“We initially focused on the tool’s efficiency features,” reveals Jeremy Bogdanowicz, the founder and CEO of the digital agency. “But something unexpected happened. People started sharing their frustrations about communication issues with their teams.”

At this point, Bogdanowicz realized the tool’s secondary benefit. Together with his team, they pivoted the messaging to highlight how the tool improves team communication.

The results made a world of difference.

By tracking user engagement on the ad campaign, the digital agency noticed a growth opportunity and adapted its strategy based on what’s happening, ultimately increasing the number of users for the project management tool.

(ii) MAXIMIZE ROI & ROAS

ROI and ROAS ensure your marketing strategy consistently drives value. Both metrics keep you in check, ensuring you’re not spending more than necessary.

[Data via DashThis]

A positive ROI like this signals healthy growth

(iii) OPTIMIZE CAMPAIGNS BASED ON DATA INSIGHTS

eCommerce stores that experience low conversion rates and average order value (AOV) on their websites but perform well on Amazon struggle with issues like site design, user experience, and poor marketing.

Odd Sox is one of them.

After engaging Adspace for marketing help, Dan Ben-Nun, CEO and founder, and his team redesigned the store’s website and ran a Google Ads campaign to promote its socks.

Much of the marketing efforts involved data-driven optimization. The ad campaigns, for instance, involved strategic bid optimizations and adjusted ad spending based on historical data to maintain stable CPAs.

Eventually, Odd Sox saw a:

58% increase in website conversion rate
52% increase in new customers
36% decrease in CPA, and
154% increase in overall conversions.

These astonishing results wouldn't be possible without strategy and measurement.

Why Marketers Run Ads to Promote & Sell… When There Are Cheaper Alternatives

Despite the hefty price tag, paid ads boast benefits other channels can’t achieve—at least not in a brief span of time. Here are three reasons you should add them to your existing marketing campaigns.

Test and validate while increasing brand visibility and reach

New businesses don’t know who their best customers are when starting out.

In this case, says Kamel Ben Yacoub, paid ads are “a fantastic way to test and validate hypotheses regarding your target audience.”

Platforms like Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads tap into your ideal audience right down to the granular level. From their interests and hobbies to industries and job titles, you can quickly find people who are most likely to take action after interacting with your ads. Over time, these platforms narrow them down so you reach more of the right customer segments.

“Sometimes it's not just about the ROI of the paid campaigns,” adds the co-founder of Getuplead. “It’s also about the business learnings you gain from them.”

By using ads to validate a total addressable market (TAM), the co-founder helped Kodo Survey generate 167% more leads in three months.

Generate leads and sales quickly

Most websites will not reach the first page of Google organically within a year—even established ones will take at least 61-182 days.

With paid ads, it’s much, much faster.

Assuming you have enough ad budget and the strategy down pat, of course.

Banzai, a virtual event platform, managed to double its number of qualified trials from paid advertising.

And it’s not only trials.

The ads also resulted in revenue directly.

“I have seen a growth in users from our paid ads,” shares Rachel Meyrowitz, the director of demand generation at the marketing tech startup. “They purchase from our website without [going through] a trial.”

Retarget prospects and get their dollars

The bad news?

Only 2% of website visitors convert on the first visit.

The good news?

People who see retargeting ads are 70% more likely to convert.

We rest our case.

Top 5 KPIs and Metrics to Measure in Ad Campaigns

Trying to measure all digital marketing metrics on your ad platforms will send you down a rabbit hole with no end in mind. Start with the metrics below—they help you understand the nuances of your ad campaigns.