The Campaigns report in Google Analytics allows you to track and gain insights into the effectiveness of marketing initiatives. The campaign report like most other reports generated within Google Analytics provides statistics on the number of visits your campaign generated, the average number of pages viewed and bounce rate. But the real power of the Campaigns Report lies in its ability to be used to track revenue generated through e-commerce sales. This function can be accessed through the ‘E-commerce’ tab on the report (refer to the screenshot below).

The information provided in the ‘E-commerce’ tab can be extremely valuable to organizations as it allows them to quantify their ROI and evaluate the effectiveness of their campaign.

In addition to revenue tracking, the campaigns report can produce detailed information regarding the performance of the different links within your campaign. For example let’s say a firm wanted to understand whether a text-based link or an image-based link within their campaign resulted in the most visits, they would be able to do this through accessing data within the Link Activity Report.

The campaigns function within Google Analytics is also quite flexible as it not only allows you to track marketing campaigns set up within Google AdWords. Campaigns set up within Google Analytics can be used to track banner ads, CPC ads and off line campaigns.

From a technical perspective, in order to be able to track campaigns, they must be assigned an ID so the Google Analytics tool knows what it is tracking. This involves attaching variables to your destination links in your ads. If you interested in learning more regarding the technical aspects of setting up campaign tracking please refer to the links listed below;

http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/15756.aspx

http://www.alexlcohen.com/web-analytics/2008/03/26/campaign-tagging-google-analytics/

http://cutroni.com/blog/2006/11/10/google-analytics-campaign-tracking-pt-0-an-overview/

 Considerations

• Please note that revenue values generated through Google Analytics should not be taken as gospel, as revenue generated through transactions where users have cookies or javascript disabled will not be recorded.
• When assigning monetary values for conversions/goals be careful to estimate accurately i.e if, for example, your sales team can close 5% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is $100, you might assign $5 (i.e. 5% of $100) to your "Contact Me" goal.

Benefits for Different Business Sectors

Multi-National Corporations

• Multi-nationals are able to analyse which countries campaign traffic is coming from and in response can tailor their investment marketing campaigns for each region.

Domestic Corporations

• Gives these companies the opportunity to effectively track and analyse marketing initiatives in international locations without having a physical presence

Medium

• Allows smaller or medium organization to invest in sophisticated marketing initiatives more cost effectively as they can rationalize cost and can measure ROI

Public Sector

• As with medium organizations can help to justify the cost of marketing initiatives as data is provided on the revenue generated

Membership Based Organisations

• Can be used to track the relationship between members and non-members responses to marketing campaigns