The internet, as we all know, is the most trackable vehicle for marketing ever created. Everything that goes through these tubes can be perfectly tracked, traced, documented, and reported on.
Ya, right.
They never mention the two little requirements:
- Every page must be properly tagged.
- Every inbound/referring URL must be properly tagged.
(In the broader sense there is of course a third issue - I’m leaving aside for now the vast weaknesses of cookies and the role they play in online tracking/accuracy.)
Why Is Tagging So Hard?
By which I mean to ask two questions:
- Why do people find it so hard to add tags? The requirement (in the simplest cases) is to accurately cut-and-paste. (Yes there are more complex cases where parameters have to be passed, for now let’s leave those aside.) Yet in enterprise environments we often see multi-month waiting times, panels and commissions and committees who need to approve them, and all forms of insanity as prerequisite to getting 316 characters in a single text-block added to the universal footer of a website, or 75 characters appended to a URL.
- Why do the environments make tagging so complex? This is the other side of the coin. Web pages and URLs need tags. This may have been a requirement not foreseen in the mid ’90’s when core web technology was developed, but it has one for many years now. Yet neither web servers nor CMS systems nor email managers nor Google/Yahoo themselves have made tagging anywhere near as simple as they could.
Tagging - A System Requirement
While I’ll fully admit to having no understanding or appreciation for ‘IT Depts’ who can’t figure out how to allocate time to update page tags (and testing them thoroughly) on at worst a weekly or monthly basis, the more I think about this problem the more I think the root of the problem is in the technology layer itself.
Software that builds or serves web pages should have the ability to conditionally add ‘tracking pixels’ or ‘code snippets’ or ‘page tags’ or whatever you want to call them to each page, and provide a single management interface for controlling these included codes, defining the conditions on which they’re embedded, and even to make the parameter passing necessary in the most complicated cases, easier.
Software that creates or delivers URLs should similarly have the ability to simply and centrally administer the appending of tracking codes to those URLs.
In Adwords, for example, there should be Account, Campaign, and Ad-Group level parameters for tracking codes you want appended to every target URL. Why should it be necessary to manually insert them (150,000 times) at the ad-group or keyword level?
Let’s face it, they’re universal 99.9% of the time. Didn’t they teach me in High School that computers simplify repetitive tasks?
And Verify Please
On both sides - the site and the URL - these systems should validate and report on the presence and contents of these codes after they’re served.
Sometimes it seems like 25% of the man-hours of the entire online marketing industry is spent find those situations where pages or URLs were missing tags. And almost certainly a percentage of all our reports are incorrect based on places where these tags are missing and nobody detects it.
This Rant Sponsored By
As a marketing and paid search agency we’ve had our fair share of (which is to say more than humanly endurable) issues related to getting tracking pixels on client websites and managing the tracking codes that need to be placed into emails, affiliate promotions, and paid search ads.
Very often weeks or months of reporting was ruined, never to be corrected, by pending or incorrect tracking code issues. I know this is typical and true in online marketing deptments everywhere.
As we’re rolling out ClickEquations we’re now living through another aspect of this problem.
Clients and prospects that want to take full advantage of our system and use our ClickEquations tags, but they just can’t get their organizations or vendors to support them - at least in reasonable time frames. Or there’s a problem dealing with the complexity and delay involved in having all target URLs updated in the engines (although this can at least be automated via the APIs).
We’re working on ways to make tagging easier for our clients, but the universality of the problem suggests that it really needs to be solved down a few layers in the infrastructure.
I think it’s time the amount of pain and trouble this problem is causing got more organized visibility, so the creators of those lower level systems could start feeling the pressure to add the kind of tagging support we all need.
How have tagging problems or complexities impacted your online marketing reporting? How can we fix or improve this situation?
Will you be at SMX in New York this week? Stop by as see ClickEquations in the Exhibit Area.
If you’ll be in New York City next week, please stop by and 
Some of it comes from the search engines themselves. But there are other important sources too. One of the unintended consequences of picking your paid search management tool is that it defines the sources of data you’ll have access to on a daily basis.
The search networks collect and provide essential performance data about your account from the engine side; only the engines know how much you spent on any campaign or adgroup, your impression counts or click-through-rates, or the all-important average cost-per-click.
Both Google and Yahoo offer their own optional conversion tags. When enabled, these expands your data set to include conversion counts, conversion rates, and makes possible some simple calculations like revenue-per-click and average-order-value. (It should be said that using these tags also gives the engines more insights into the performance of your business, a fact that many companies legitimately fear.)
No matter how many metrics or TrueMetrics we provide, we know that nearly every search manager or business has their own unique views or needs for data - which is why with the Excel-based ClickEquations Analyst you can add user-defined calculated metrics to any reports.
Targeting means showing your ads to the right people. Paid search ads are delivered as answers to questions. People type in a search query and you pay for the privilege of having your ad be one potential answer to that question.
Once we’ve targeted the right people using different ad-groups, we can then look inside the ad-group and take advantage of the fact that we don’t have to place the same value on everyone in that group.
People decide how well our paid search advertising does. They decide how to formulate queries which trigger our ads (or not) and they click (or don’t) and buy (or not).
Even in this greatly summarized view of the paid search process, there are a lot of moving parts. Each exists by the hundreds, thousands, or hundreds-of-thousands in typical campaigns. They occur tens-of-thousands of times every day as impression and click counts increment. And we have weeks and months of history for all of this to consider and trend.
ClickEquations has been developed with a clear long term development vision in mind.
Bid management is the emperor in the paid search management world, and while he’s not entirely naked he certainly doesn’t have nearly as many clothes on as some would like you to believe.
But buying/choosing/believing in a paid search management tool because of its ‘bid management’ capabilities is like believing you can win the Indy 500 if you just tune your carburetor perfectly.
We’re just tending to their machine - and paying for the privilege.
It’s a lot closer to a horror show.
And the software tools haven’t fared will in this rapid-change environment either. The engines built interfaces that primarily serve their own needs. Instead of thinking about how paid search managers actually should and do work, and building tools to facilitate this effort, the tools are organized around the needs of the engines and their algorithms.
