Campaign Intelligence offers clear business view

Today's online marketing mix usually includes many components, and it's important that each is earning a return on the investment, argues online campaign intelligence expert speed-trap.

As so often quoted, John Wanamaker, father of the department store, famously said in the late 1800s: "I know half of my advertising budget is wasted; the problem is, I don't know which half".

The arrival of e-business to today's marketing mix did not solve his problem, but new campaign intelligence tools now can.

Today, fast, accurate and complete information on each campaign is sought, whether that's search engine optimisation, banner advertising, affiliate programmes, portals, loyalty cards, micro-ites, email campaigns, in-site promotions or even print advertising.

Without this intelligence 50%, 60% or even 100% of marketing budgets may be being wasted, and without powerful campaign intelligence, like Wanamaker, we might never know.

What makes a great campaign? The goal of a marketing campaign changes from campaign to campaign and company to company, so when assessing the relative merits of a campaign, a complete profile of the visitors it delivered is needed in order to understand its value and effectiveness.

Traditional traffic stats just do not hit the spot when it comes to campaign intelligence.

Hits and page impression data, even segmented by campaign, do not answer these questions - attracting more traffic to websites only costs money, unless they actually achieve the business goals set for them.

To understand the performance of current campaigns, and to be able to plan for new ones, detailed, segmented and accurate data is imperative.

Data that provides real understanding about the people the campaign is attracting, what they are looking for, what they are doing and the value that each represents.

This insight enables informed decisions to be made about marketing expenditure, and ensures the maximum return on investment from each and every campaign.

Lastly, such a system needs to be deployed without breaking the bank, websites, or site developers.

Campaign Intelligence, from Newbury-based business intelligence company speed-trap is one such tool.

Its unique (and patented) technology is considered to make it more flexible, agile, effective, and easier to own than probably any other system available.

At the end of the day, it usually comes down to money; whether that money comes in the shape of advertising budget constraints or income from advertising sales, product sales, or referrals; money matters and speed-trap's Campaign Intelligence allows the tracking of each of those parameters for every campaign and visitor.

Each session arriving on the site is classified according to its source, and the cost of acquiring that visitor is recorded.

Then every page they load, every button they click, every purchase they make or every product they view is recorded against the session's record - with all that data its child's play to provide any reports needed.

Via Campaign Intelligence, costs and income from each and every visitor and campaign can also be tracked, thus even enabling the auditing of unique visitors versus click-throughs, spotting robot-generated click-through fakes.

Other facilities include the following.

Cost-per-click: When buying traffic via banner ads or affiliate programs, Campaign Intelligence lets you attach a cost-per-click for each campaign, and then will keep track of the cost on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, annual or accounting-period.

Fixed Cost Campaigns: If you are running campaigns with a fixed cost, then Campaign Intelligence lets you amortise this cost over all the traffic the campaign generates, attaching an appropriate cost to each arriving session.

Advertising Sales: If selling advertising space, Campaign Intelligence can be told which pages have banners and how much income is generated from each impression, it will then keep track of the income generated by visitors from each campaign.

Product Sales: If you sell things from a website, Campaign Intelligence can be told how to recognise a purchaser, and where the checkout basket value is shown on the page, it will then indicate sales volume by campaign by hour.

Goal Achievement: If generating income by referring customers to third-party sites, tell Campaign Intelligence about the clicks which generate the referring revenue and the value of each click and it will compute the income from each goal and break this down by campaign too.

Profit: With all this data, Campaign Intelligence can therefore tell us what we really need to know - the net profit or loss generated by each campaign each and every day.

Enabling informed decisions to be made and making marketing budgets work harder and smarter.

This campaign intelligence system can track many sorts of campaign using several different mechanisms, some of these may be a tad technical for some readers but they are worth saying all the same.

Landing Pages: If campaigns are arranged to deliver visitors to a specific page, Campaign Intelligence can automatically assign the session to the defined campaign.

This is often a good approach because it ensures the page content is directly relevant to the campaign - and that always improves conversion.

Query Strings: If a value to a query string is added in the link behind the e-mail, banner or whatever, then Campaign Intelligence can pick this out and use it to automatically assign the correct campaign source to the visitor.

This approach typically needs no changes to the website, so seems to be a simple, low-cost approach with lots of flexibility.

Referrer: When a session arrives via another site it often has details of the page with the link to your site.

This "referrer" information can automatically be used to recognise the campaign or site generating the visit.

Source-Page-Monitoring: For the ultimate in 'auditability', Campaign Intelligence's monitoring tag can be included in affiliate sites, thus allowing you to track from the originating click right through to the purchase on your site, more complex to do, but solid answers if you need them.

Campaign URL: Where using print, TV or radio advertising then it makes sense to direct visitors to an easy-to-remember URL, and Campaign Intelligence will automatically be able to track the visitors as they arrive and then link into the main site.

Using these techniques means we can at long last track almost any type of campaign and provide traffic, unique visitor, cost, revenue and profit results for every one.

To recap: Banner Advertising: Query String, Landing Page, Source Page Monitoring or Campaign URL.

Affiliate: Query String, Landing Page, Source Page Monitoring, Campaign URL or Referrer.

E-mail: Landing Page, Query String, Campaign URL Print/TV/Radio: Campaign URL or Landing page.

Sponsored Search: Query String, Landing Page or Campaign URL Search (un-sponsored): Referrer (and we will tell you the search terms your visitors used).

This approach means you can even get information on visitors who are directly typing your URL into their browser, or have bookmarked a page, and therefore understand more about online brand-awareness.

And you can define, review and manage your campaign definitions directly from your browser.

Having all this information is only the first part of the story; to make use of the intelligence you need to be able to move from columns of figures into understanding.

Campaign Intelligence has a facility called Active Dashboard which allows you to interact with all the reports and data that Campaign Intelligence has provided.

This means you can look at data as charts or tables, filter it by campaign type (email, affiliate, search etc) or for results for a specific campaign, period, hour, day, etc.

Data can be re-clustered to look at results by hour, day, week, month, or whatever, to look for cyclic trends in campaign performance, or drill down to see trends for other variables, or focus on a specific campaign, date or income.

This ability to interact with the data makes analysis far more productive, and effective.

Lastly, if you need to pass the data along to another part of your organisation, you can export the data from a report at a click of a button for analysis or for transfer to your in-house data warehouse.

Fast deployment options for every enterprise Campaign Intelligence's unique architecture also means that it is fast and simple to deploy.

Customers have deployed systems within an hour, and had answers to key questions within two.

It can track hundreds of campaigns and millions of users, and let you launch, change or drop campaigns without a single change to the site.

Perhaps most importantly you can choose exactly how you want to deploy Campaign Intelligence - choose a monthly ASP service, and be up-and-running for the cost of a two-minute change to your web templates.

Or run it in-house for complete control of your information and real-time raw data analysis.

This flexible approach lets you get access to Campaign Intelligence without killing your IT department.

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