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, the campaign tracking support provided by the web analytics module may be used, which allows you to accurately monitor traffic generated by individual campaigns. This can include banners, marketing e‑mails or any other method used to present links to your website. In addition to logging the amount of visits, this feature lets you keep records of any important actions performed on the website by users who arrive as a result of a campaign.

 

How the tracking works

 

There are several ways to identify visitors who come to your site through a campaign link (further details can be found in the Managing campaigns topic). When this happens, the system updates the visit statistics and stores a cookie named Campaign in the user's browser, which saves 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 (its 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. Please refer to the Conversions chapter for information about how the tracking of individual actions can be configured.

 

If the visitor registers on the website while the cookie is still valid, the name of the currently active campaign will be permanently stored in their user settings (administrators may view the value in Administration -> edit () user -> Settings -> Campaign). This data field only serves to provide information about users and is not used to track activity on the website.

 

Campaign statistics and results can be viewed using special reports available in the web analytics interface, which are described in the Evaluating campaigns topic.