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.
An ad campaign is a series of paid ads that promote a product, service, or business.
There are three types of campaigns:
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:
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:
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:
These astonishing results wouldn't be possible without strategy and measurement.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of clicks your ad receives from all users who see it
How to improve this metric:
Cost per click (CPC) is the price paid for each ad click
How to improve this metric:
Conversion rate (CVR) is the percentage of users who completed a valuable action measured against the total number of visitors over a time period.
How to improve this metric:
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the price you pay for every customer acquired.
How to improve this metric:
Return on ad spend (ROAS) is the revenue you get back for every dollar spent on your ad campaigns.
How to improve this metric:
DashThis is the easiest PPC reporting tool.
Automatically grab your entire PPC results across different channels into one beautiful report.
This way, you analyze your overall campaign performance in a single interface, distilling insights and spotting opportunities for growth easily.
Here’s how it works:
DashThis will automatically gather your entire data into your report. Drag and drop them to form a cohesive look (e.g., Facebook Ads in one section, LinkedIn Ads in another).
Customize the report to fit clients’ needs.
Suppose you have a lead generation strategy, and one of the PPC KPIs you want to show is the overall cost per lead (CPL) across Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
Consider combining both sources in a single widget to help clients visualize their overall marketing spend (note: for this to work, the graph type and KPIs need to be compatible).
Locate the LinkedIn Ads CPL and click Edit Widget > Merge Widgets. Select the widget (Google Ads CPL) you want to merge.
Click Save.
You can also add notes and comments within the report (note: this tip is ideal for folks frustrated with the back-and-forth emails with clients).
Say you want to convince a client to replicate your top-performing ad messaging into your organic social media posts. Or create a new email campaign to nurture the incoming free trial users.
Click Static Widget > Add Comment.
Here’s how it might look when you explain the ROI of email marketing and recommend a new email sequence to convert trial users to paid customers.
Click Save.
Work with clients who just can’t get the hang of marketing acronyms (e.g., GDPR, pixels, A/B testing)? Use the note widget to define these terms. Hover to a widget and click Add Note.
Click Save.
Once you’re done, schedule an automated email dispatch:
Now your report is sent to all stakeholders according to your preferred period and frequency, automatically.
Alternatively, send over a URL link.
Both sharing options allow everyone to view the reports in real-time.
Now that it’s possible to automate reports in the blink of an eye, you can finally ditch those manual tasks, gain back hours of your time, and spend more of your days on billable work.
Start your free 15-day trial to automate campaign tracking today.
Stop wasting your ad budget on clicks that don’t convert. Grab this PPC dashboard to find untapped keywords and maximize your revenue for the next month’s campaign.
Grab this free PPC report with your own data!
Look no further than this report if you want to justify the ad spend for your favorite marketing channel. This dashboard gathers data across multiple advertising platforms, visualizing which performs best.
Grab this free advertising campaign report with your own data!
Get a snapshot of your paid search strategy in this standalone Google Ads report. Use it to illustrate how your up-funnel metrics (e.g., website traffic, clicks) impact revenue and gauge your advertising effectiveness across the customer journey.
Grab this Google Ads report with your own data!
From messaging to untapped audience, campaign tracking helps you spot all kinds of hidden opportunities you can think of.
For best results, track your campaigns with an automated PPC reporting tool like DashThis.
It auto-grabs your entire ads data across different channels into one beautiful report. Either create a standalone ads report or an all-in-one marketing dashboard in one place (note: DashThis also integrates with other marketing channels like Ahrefs, Klaviyo, CallRail, and more).
DashThis is the easiest reporting tool. Start your free 15-day trial to automate campaign tracking, gain back hours of your time, and spend more of your days on billable work today.
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