Tracking an Online White Paper: Case Study

Company A offers white papers within their industry. They use the advanced tracking tools to create a tracking group that they name "September 04 whitepaper offer." This tracking group is simply a category for grouping together a series of specific trackers they will use in various marketing efforts with regard to this new white paper. Such marketing efforts will include an email announcement about the white paper, a Google Ad, and a postcard they will be mailed out. Additionally, they will be featuring this white paper on their site's homepage and so they will want to track downloads resulting from the homepage link as well.

First, Company A creates a "trackable email newsletter" and assigns it to the "September 04 white paper offer" tracking group. They also set up an alias called "GoogleAdwhitepaper" for the Google Ad they are going to run. Since clicking on a Google banner ad triggers this alias, it can be named descriptively for your purposes rather than naming it something that makes sense to the visitor. However, since the visitor will have to type in the alias to be printed on their postcard, the company will name it something easy for them to remember, like "whitepaper." The third alias, since it will also be used as a link off of their homepage, can be given a more descriptive name such as "9-4_homepage-whitepaper." The viewer does not see this text, only the link. All of these aliases will be assigned to the tracking group "September 04 white paper offer."

Unique trackers for each specific effort will allow the company to compare the performance of each marketing effort. They will ultimately know how many sessions and overall page views resulted from each tracker. Company A can also view the full list of all of the actual sessions associated with the tracker, and they can look at the specific pages viewed by each session. However, aside from curiosity, the overall tracking group information will be most helpful.

By assigning all four of the above trackers to the same tracker group (September 04 white paper offer) based on their common purpose (marking the white paper) they will be able to review overall session data for the entire white paper campaign. These statistics include a breakdown of overall sessions by month, the top ten sessions (those users who spent the most time and looked at the most pages on the site), and most important, the top ten most popular pages viewed by visitors from this tracking group.   next >