As an Online Marketing Advertiser, who never had any tracking issue ? Nobody. Indeed, performance and cost tracking is not the simplest thing to implement for a e-commerce company. If your implementation is not well done it could quickly get to a terrible mess which will cost you a lot of time, energy and money. So if you click while reading the following keywords, this article is for you : monday reportings, discrepancies, duplicate sales, granular levels, different tools, cookies, mess…

Here are some tracking advice for e-commerce advertisers :

1- Use 1 Single Tool to track 100% of your activity

If you are using different source of information to consolidate your overall traffic activity, that’s not good. In order to accurately track your web traffic – coming from all sources – you need to use one single tool where you can get, for 100% of your traffic the following information :

Metrics : Sessions, Conversions (Registrations, Orders, Forms…), Conversion Rate, Order Value, Sales, New vs. Repeat

Dimensions : Channel groups, Channels, Vendors, Campaigns

With the Internal Information above, you would already have a good and accurate view of your website traffic activity (but so far you do not have cost information in here). But what are the solutions to get there ?

* Internal tool : From my point of view, developing an internal tracking tool is The Best Solution. However, this is not easy and will need a lot of engineering, experience and competencies on your side. In addition, you will still miss some information that you could get with Web Analytics tools. But do you really need so that much detail? Advantages would be that it will be Faster, more Flexible to adapt your own needs, you could develop your own Partner Tracking interface or Internal affiliate platform, you will be able to fire Third party Tracking Pixels on your confirmation page only when needed, and you will have No Discrepancies with your real sales. Then, it will be connected easily with your CRM which will help you doing ad’oc analysis regarding the quality of the customers you acquire and who they are.

* Site-Centric Web Analytics : Web analytics tools are extremely powerfull and will go very deep in the website analysis and merchandising (pages views, products, internal search engine…). Google Analytics is the most famous tool but you also have Omniture, Xiti, Coremetrics… and plenty of them. These solutions are incredibly seductive but are not that easy to implement well and will cost you money based on your website’s number of page views (could easyly be more than 50k€/year for a website with 2.5M unique visitor per month). What I felt most frustrating is that you cannot get the advantage mentioned above with your own tool (especially flexibility), it could be slower, and you will always have some discrepancies with your real data (a canceled order will not be deleted in the tool). In addition, you won’t be able to pass any personnal/customer information.

2- Differentiate Internal vs. External information

Now you have a clean, single, traffic reporting broken down by channels, vendors, campaigns with your Internal information (Sessions, Orders…), you will have to integrate the External information, like Cost, but also Impressions, Email sent…

Except for an internal affiliate program, or CPA partnerships based on your datas, cost data will always be external information. Here are some examples :

* Paid Search : the cost is based on Google Advertising platform depending on the numbers of Clicks and the Volume, with different prices depending on keyword, days… Maybe Google will charge you for 35.000 Clicks while you measure 28.000 Sessions ? It will not change anything on the invoice.

* Affiliate Platforms : this cost is based on the conversions (Share of sales, Cost per Order…) generated by the affiliates of each platform. However, the information they track will never be the exact same one as yours in your tools (even if you control the display of their tracking pixel). Even though you can cancel orders, the final invoicing will be based on their platform, which is external information.

* CPM Campaigns : this is a fix cost associated with a time frame, an external information based on the IO you signed or on the Volume of Impressions measured by your media partner. It may also include agency fees.

Here are some more examples of external/Internal Information:

- a Click is external while a visit, a visitor are internal

- Impressions are external Information while Page Views are internal

- Email Sent is an external information

All these external datas and metrics are KEY to measure Marketing Campaigns Performance and this important to try to integrate them in your internal tools. This is a tough part of the job and here are some solution to make it possible :

- Use Google API to get the cost, at the granular level you want (Campaigns, Adgroups, Keywords…)

- Manually enter Costs in your database for some vendors or campaigns

- Develop Data Feeds with your key Technical (email sender, adserver) and Marketing partners (Search, Shopbots…) back to your system to get Impressions, Email sent, Cost…

- Pay affiliates and CPA partners based on your own datas

If you manage to get all this, in a fast refreshing reporting, your whole team will gain plenty of time and will be able to analyze campaigns better and take the good decisions and actions way quicker.

3- Use External Campaign Management Tools

Even if you now have a Unique Reporting with External Information integrated, you won’t be able to get the same granular information as specialized campaign management tools, which have a lot of channel specific features. So don’t try to do everything internally.

* Search Marketing : This is the biggest thing within the Online Advertising Industry and there are plenty of tools out on the marketplace to manage Paid Search Campaigns and get feature like : keyword management, reportings, Bid Management, Cost integration… I am not expert with the tools names – although I’ve seen a lot – but here is some features I would love to get : Include Paid and Organic in the tool and Classify back Organic based on Paid search campaign organization, cross campaigns top keyword reports, Landing page split run at the Keyword level (for top keywords)

* Affiliate programs : While you may only track each affiliate programs with 2 or 3 links and you can’t access to any information about individual affiliates with your internal report, the affiliate platform give you the ability to track every single affiliates and creative. On the other hand you may not get interesting information like New vs. Repeat per Affiliate. Major platforms are : Commission Junction, Tradedoubler, Zanox, Affilinet…

* Display Advertising : If you are serious about this, do not give banners/URLs to each advertising partner. You will spend time preparing all the materials, have no global campaign visibility and no reactivity if you need to change. For many advertisers using an Advertiser Adserver is not very common (it is for agency, also because they make money on it). Although it may cost you up to 10% of your Media cost, you should gain this money back through campaign and creative optimization, time saving, knowledge transfer…

Here are some solution : DoubleClick, Mediaplex, Atlas, Bluestreak, + others

This is a lot of information but remember :

* Use 1 tool for your daily overall reports

* Different tools to manage campaigns and get cost information,

* Try to minimize discrepancies between the different tools

* Try to integrate as much external data as possible