Relabelling campaigns – A quick labelling reporting hack to save you time

When you’re reporting on your campaigns – I bet you’re not only interested in the individual campaign performance right? But the overarching performance of your mix? Yep! That’s what I thought. 

 If that’s feeling all a bit “What you talkin’ about KC?” Then you haven’t graduated from my Free 5 Day Marketing Attribution Email Challenge!

I want to talk about something small you can do in 5 minutes to make a HUGE difference to the speed of your reporting. It’s also so simple you might slap your forehead if you’re not already doing it. I’m talking about labelling your campaigns! 

If you’ve followed me for a little while, read my blog content or have graduated from my 5 Day Attribution Challenge, you would know that I always report back on the effectiveness of marketing strategies by assigning key channels to their PURPOSE. 

This being, ATTENTION, ENGAGEMENT, ACTION, OUTCOME or RETENTION/LOYALTY/ADVOCACY.

You might choose to use different language, from “Awareness”, “Consideration”, “Conversion”, “Loyalty” or even “Cool”, “Warm”, “Hot”!  

Whatever you choose to use – adding labels to your campaigns can really help when reporting later. Whether you’re downloading data into excel to manipulate it, adding it to a data studio dashboard or viewing it in Google Analytics (and if you’re stuck on where to find it DM me on Instagram, I’m your friendly Data Driven Marketing Mentor)! 

OK so why are we doing this?

We want to do this for two reasons: 

Measuring Attribution Overlap

• We want to understand across our channels whether they are complementing one another or overlapping in their efforts. When we label campaigns against their PURPOSE we can easily see whether they’re overlapping when we review performance in Google Analytics.
• Typically I see ATTENTION overlap between Facebook, YouTube, Google Display, Broad Google Search and Direct Traffic which I usually driven from above the line (ABL) or out of home (OOH)
• I also see ENGAGEMENT overlap between remarketing and email marketing and SMS strategies (nurture channels, makes sense right?)

Measuring Linear Jumps

• Did you catch last week’s 5 Minute Friday lesson on measuring Path Length and Time Lag in Google Analytics? If not, you can check out the wrap up of that lesson over on the blog here (though as a subscriber, you’re always the first to receive these hot tips). This is just one other metric that helps us understand whether people are converting FAST or if they require a little more nurturing. What we do want to understand regardless though is whether our campaign performance is driving these fast conversions or slower. Take these examples…
• Say we are running “ATTENTION” or “AWARENESS” campaigns – yet people appear to be converting “last click” directly after viewing these ads. If so, there’s an argument to say perhaps the ads are more targeted than we first thought (more bottom of funnel) or perhaps the messaging and landing pages are just SUPER high converting? If this were the case, we might choose to optimise our awareness campaigns to target a little more broadly – while still using these campaigns and relabelling them as “Engagement” or “Action” (or warm/hot if you’re using that language).
• Remember, it’s not that we don’t want to continue to invest in these campaigns – if they’re converting, we definitely do!! Though it’s important we understand how they fit into our strategy. If they’re causing a non-linear funnel outcome (i.e. people are seeing an ad and purchasing right away), we might want to exhaust this target set and impression share for this campaign and then move “up the funnel” to find and convert a wider market share. 

So how do we actually label? I’m so glad you asked!  Since Facebook doesn’t yet appear to have a labelling feature, I tend to just add the words I want to see ahead of the campaigns along with adding UTM tracking on links to ensure I can see the same references in Google Analytics. Sitting there thinking “What on earth is a UTM?” I’ve got you, read up on this important tracking feature here. 

Google however (they just always have it together, don’t they?) have a labelling feature which is perfect for this.  Simply click on the campaign you want to label, head to the blue toolbar, click “Label” > “Create New Label” and there you have it. You can add a title, description and even colour code them!  

 If you want to easily see performance alignment in GA though, you may still want to change the actual campaign name or tag up your URLs accordingly. 

You can also create custom groupings in GA to achieve the same outcome, but that’s a tutorial for another day… 

The main benefit of having these labels in the ad accounts themselves is to easily optimise within the platforms rather than having to remember which campaigns are aligned to which of the strategies in your funnel.