Real-Time Campaign Activity

If you work at an organization that does a lot of digital marketing campaigns, there may be occasions in which you or your stakeholders want to see activity in real-time. In this post, I will demonstrate how to do this in Adobe Analytics.

Campaign Tracking – eVar

If you are using digital marketing campaigns, you should already be tracking marketing campaign codes in the Adobe Analytics Campaigns variable. This involves passing some sort of string that represents each different advertising spot down to the most granular level. These codes can be numeric or you can structure them in a way that makes sense to your organization. I use the UTM method that Google has made a common standard.

However, even if you are tracking your campaigns correctly in the Campaigns variable, there is another step you need to take in order to view people accessing the campaign codes in real-time. Adobe Analytics real-time reports work best with Success Events and sProps. The Campaigns variable in Adobe Analytics is an eVar and eVars don’t work super-well with real-time reports because they persist. If you attempt to select the Tracking Code (Campaigns) eVar from within the real-time report configurator, you will see this:

This scary warning is basically telling you that using an eVar might not work. Here is what the real-time report looks like if you ignore the warning:

As you can see, that doesn’t produce the results you want. Therefore, once you have your campaign codes in the Tracking Code (Campaigns) variable, there is one more step you need to take to view them in real-time.

Campaign Tracking – sProp

Since real-time reports work better with sProps, the next step is to copy your campaign tracking code values to a sProp. This can be done via JavaScript, TMS or a processing rule. Here is a simple Processing Rule that I created to copy the values over to a sProp:

To be sure the data is copying over correctly after you have some time for data to collect, you can open the new sProp report and view the data:

Next, you can go back to the real-time report configurator and choose to base your report on this new sProp dimension. Once you save and refresh, you will see your campaign codes stream in as visitors hit your site:

Filtering

One last tip related to using the real-time reports. In this campaign code scenario, you may find cases in which the real-time report contains codes that are from older campaigns that don’t apply to your current analysis. For example, you might want to see how the various “exp-cloud-aud” campaign codes are performing, but there are others appearing as well:

Luckily, there is an easy way to filter the real-time report values to focus on the exact ones you want (assuming you have named them in a way conducive to text filtering). This can be done by adding a text filter in the search box as shown here:

Summary

While I am not often a huge fan of “real-time” data, there may be some cases in which you want to see how different advertising units are performing quickly so you can make some adjustments to hit your conversion targets. This simple method allows you to easily see how campaign codes are being used in real-time. Lastly, if you use processing rules for your marketing channels, you can follow the same approach to see marketing channel usage in real-time as well.