Better Campaign Metrics: Measuring Traffic and Conversions Using Omniture CID Codes

By: Estefan Albiero

Omniture’s SiteCatalyst is one of the most powerful tools on the market for measuring online ad campaign effectiveness. Since many of El Toro’s enterprise customers use SiteCatalyst for web analytics, we wanted to discuss how to integrate our IP Targeting technology with SiteCatalyst. One way to measure conversions on your campaign is by attaching a campaign ID code (CID) to your campaign’s landing page. CID codes allow marketing teams to get a basic idea of campaign effectiveness based on the amount of user impressions and clicks. See information about where your ad recipients come from, which campaigns are more effective to particular demographics, and more, simply by adding one line of code.

When the landing page is accessed, the campaign ID code is captured from that URL and tracked by SiteCatalyst.

The goal is to turn this: “https://eltoro.com/blog/”

Into this: “https://eltoro.com/blog/?cid=mycampaign”

That’s all it takes to start measuring campaign effectiveness at a higher level. All you need is a tiny bit of code  and an extra minute of time. There is a line of code called the getQueryParam plugin. It usually looks like this:

s.campaign = s.getQueryParam('cid');

Placing this line of javascript code in the s_code.js file turns a click or pageview into a measured result in SiteCatalyst. The “CID” portion of the code can be named according to your preferences, just make sure it is uniform throughout all related code. This allows tagging and sorting campaign tracking based purely off of campaign name.

At a surface level, tracking with CID code provides a solid metric. However, it is NOT the most important one. Click-through rate and impressions are great, but don’t mean much unless they can be validated with sales. The most accurate measurement of ROI is by using El Toro’s match back analysis.
Matchback analysis is something that comes standard with every campaign we do at El Toro, and it tells our customers whether or not their campaign has reached your target audience, by measuring how many members of your specific target audience converted to a sale.

For instance, here is an example of a match back analysis report we did comparing Direct Mail and a Banner ad, and comparing the lift El Toro was able to help our client achieve. As you can see, the addition of El Toro to the mix was able to add a 108% percent lift to the response rate (automotive purchases in this case) —which is a great tool for linking digital advertising with sales numbers.

With the tools available to digital marketers today, there’s no reason why your campaign shouldn't be taking advantage of all the benefits CID tracking and match-back analysis can bring your company. Also, for clients who use Google Analytics, please check out our article on using UTM Codes to track site attribution.

For more information on how we can make solutions like these work for you, don’t hesitate to contact us.