The impending obsolescence of third-party cookies presents a tracking nightmare for PPC managers.
With broken attribution models, how can you confidently report campaign performance and optimize ad spend?
While perfect one-to-one attribution is impossible, all hope is not lost.
By shifting your focus to long-term trends and incrementality, capturing campaign data through UTM, agreeing to a single source of truth, and having a plan for tracking breaks, you can still get actionable insights from your campaign reports. PPC
With the right approach, paid campaigns can still demonstrate value and drive effective optimization no matter how murky the tracking waters.
This article explores practical strategies for making paid media reporting work despite the messy post-cookie world.
Follow these tips to prepare your PPC reports for a post-cookie world.
1. Include comparisons
Whenever reports are prepared, context is key. One of the best ways to position current data is to show how it compares to past data.
Depending on your industry and how seasonality affects your results, you may want to highlight the comparison to the previous month or the same period last year (or both).
Discuss where you’re seeing growth and where you’re seeing declines, and think about factors like budget changes and messaging updates that may have impacted performance.
2. Show long-term trends
Also, only reporting on short-term periods is irrelevant and can oversell success or raise unnecessary red flags about performance lags that are fixed over a broader time frame.
For example, you may find that looking at a one-week period in the middle of the month shows a decrease in conversions, but your business tends to receive the most conversions at the beginning and end of the month. So once you factor in the whole month, the data points to a positive performance.
3. Use multiple platforms, but agree on one source of truth
There is a lot of talk in our industry about the discrepancies between platforms, which often leads to a complete mistrust of certain platforms.
For example, Google Analytics events they rarely match to conversions in Google Ads, for various reasons.
Look at the conversion rate between platforms and watch if this changes over time. Google Analytics may record 80% of the conversions you track with a Google Ads pixel.
You can use this as a rough guide of what to expect. However, if you suddenly see the ratio drop to 50%, you may want to investigate potential labeling issues.
Within your organization or through a conversation with your customer, you should agree on a common source of truth for reporting. It can be an analytics platform, a CRM or a CDP.
Agreeing on a common source of truth doesn’t necessarily mean you’re seeing these numbers as guaranteed, accurate contact totals.
Instead, you simply make sure you’re using the same data set when reporting total leads/sales, and you can get ahead of potential questions by only using your ad platform and stakeholder reports just look at Salesforce.
4. Capture the UTM parameters
Maintain a system for adding consistent UTM parameters to URLs for key dimensions such as source, medium, campaign, and keyword.
In turn, configure your CRM or whatever system you use to track leads to capture the UTM parameters attached to the initial landing page a user lands on.
This will help you provide your own source data for each lead or sale. Additionally, iOS may remove some personally identifiable settings (such as the Google Click ID or a Salesforce ID) in Safari when a user arrives via Private Browsing. However, UTM parameters should not be removed.
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5. Incorporate coupon codes
Using a unique coupon code to link specific campaigns or users can be an additional route to link performance directly to your paid media campaigns.
Here are two options:
Assign a general code with a landing page that is only used for a specific campaign. Use URL parameters to dynamically populate a code that is entered into a form field when a user submits a contact form or completes a sale.
6. Consider incrementality testing
Another way to measure the overall effectiveness of a digital advertising channel is through lift.
Essentially, this involves setting up a test where a subset of users are exposed to ads and others are not, and then looking at whether there was an increase in conversions for those who received ads.
There are a few ways to implement an incrementality test:
geography: Choose regions with similar populations and demographics to compare with each other.
time– Run ads for a set period that’s long enough to get a sense of their importance, then turn off ads for the same period of time, comparing results at the end. While this route can provide a clean way to test your entire geographic footprint, be careful when adjusting for seasonality.
Divided public: Show ads to a test group and not to a control group, then compare performance between the two.
7. Prepare for tracking breaks
Inevitably, tracking will break and over or under count conversions. It’s important to have a plan for when this happens.
Tracking data across multiple platforms allows you to pull data from a backup source when needed.
While we talked about agreeing on a primary “source of truth” for reporting consistency, you can explain that you’re getting data from (say) the same ad platform for a specific month rather than relying on CRM data when there is a synchronization problem. leads to CRM.
Then note when the tracking problem occurred and when it was resolved. That way, when you look at the results a year later, you’ll remember why there was a gap in the data.
Attribution has never been 100% perfect. While ad and analytics platforms have made good efforts to integrate data, offline interactions, cross-device activity, and multi-touch behavior have always made attributing conversions to a specific source messy
For example, maybe someone who searched for your product and bought it already had a positive perception of it through word of mouth from a friend that wouldn’t be tracked in any analytics platform.
Ultimately, the goal of ad platform conversion tracking isn’t necessarily to be able to individually link each conversion to an actual purchase or lead.
Think of conversion tracking more as directional data that shows how metrics like total conversions, conversion rate, CPA, and ROAS have changed over time.
Our ability to track marketing data will become messier. So think about how you approach informing your business stakeholders.
Do your best to set up ad platform conversions, analytics events, CRM fields, and anything else you use to track success.
However, be transparent about the fact that the data you can track doesn’t give perfect attribution, and that what you report is a guide to optimizing and measuring business success.
Treat your data as directional and look at changes over time, while looking for alternative methods to track success outside of what you can track directly on the platforms.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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