Online advertising is an important part of any business. Depending on your strategy you may be trying to find new customers, re-engage existing customers, or re-target a potential customer that has fallen off. An important aspect of online advertising is the ability to accurately measure success of your advertising campaigns.
With several new laws in place preventing tracking and technology that makes user silent to your analytics and advertising accounts how do you do this? How can you accurately know if a customer that placed an order through TRYTN did it organically or through a campaign that you spent money to get them here?
Most advertising tools offer reporting and utilize a technology called JavaScript along with cookies to track users’ movement from site to site to determine if they clicked on one of your ads. But some users don’t support third-party tracking or cookies or even JavaScript. So how do you track these users accurately? How do you know the order they placed for your activity came from your advertising campaign? Even more likely, how can you guarantee that the tracking code executed prior to the user leaving the page? Problem is you can’t. So what can you do?
Utilize “Tracking Source Codes” within TRYTN. How this works is you set up your advertising campaign. When you provide the link for the user to click on you also append an src parameter on the end of that URL. This can include letters, numbers, underscores, and dashes. Make it as descriptive as possible so that you can uniquely identify the campaign, keyword(s), and ad that user came from. When the order is placed the TRYTN system stores this src parameter with the payment record. From there you can report on it in the report generator using the “Transaction: Tracking Source Code” field.
A Real-World Example
As an example consider you’re running a Facebook campaign. Your ad is directing your ad audience to go learn more about your bike tours, so you have a website URL of https://www.exampletourcompany.com/our-tours/30-minute-bike-tour. With this example you’d add an src parameter to this URL like so: https://www.exampletourcompany.com/our-tours/30-minute-bike-tour?src=facebook-30-minute-bike-tour-july20. Even as this is an example if I were to look at this in a report I would know this order came from a Facebook ad specifically for a 30 minute bike tour and it came from an ad campaign I was running in July of 2020. Use your imagination and be specific so you can really nail down where advertising dollars are being best utilized.
Using the embedding experience this will work as-is. The system will automatically identify and attach any src code in the URL. If you happen to use the regular booking experience you will need to write a small amount of code to pass the SRC code over to the booking engine or direct your advertising URLs directly and deeply into the booking engine.
