A client recently noted that a large online publication’s advertising sales rep showed him the number of “clicks” his online ads were getting noting that the campaign was performing well. When the client reviewed his Google Analytics account, he could only attribute 30% of his incoming referrals to the advertising campaign. He called us to ask, “is my ad rep misstating my results?”

After a bit of investigation, we noted that his ads were being placed in many different places on the publication’s website. Only a small fraction of the referral traffic was attributable to the publication by name. Other traffic emanating from campaign ads came from other domains associated with the publication, but not carrying the publication’s primary domain name.

Google Analytics sets cookies that carry referrer details. This is how Google then reports the source of your campaign / website traffic. So, if you are placing online traffic, you need to be sure you understand exactly how your ads are being served and where. If there are other domains serving your ads, you need to know those domain names otherwise you won’t be able to evaluate the effectiveness of your ad’s referral traffic to your website.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool. It allows you to segregate, benchmark, analyze, and annotate. If you are using it to gain intelligence on how your website performs, you or your marketing staff may want to set aside time to understand more about how it works. You can watch video tutorials from Google Analytics here.
 

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