Piwik

Les articles publiés sur le site

• Make better marketing decisions with attribution modeling

  19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft

  Do you suspect some traffic sources are not getting the rewards they deserve? Do you want to know how much credit each of your marketing channel actually gets?

  When you look at which referrers contribute the most to your goal conversions or purchases, Matomo (Piwik) shows you only the referrer of the last visit. However, in reality, a visitor often visits a website multiple times from different referrers before they convert a goal. Giving all credit to the referrer of the last visit ignores all other referrers that contributed to a conversion as well.

  You can now push your marketing analysis to the next level with attribution modeling and finally discover the true value of all your marketing channels. As a result, you will be able to shift your marketing efforts and spending accordingly to maximize your success and stop wasting resources. In marketing, studying this data is called attribution modeling.

  Get the true value of your referrers

  Attribution is a premium feature that you can easily purchase from the Matomo (Piwik) marketplace.

  Once installed, you will be able to:

  • identify valuable referrers that you did not see before
  • invest in potential new partners
  • attribute a new level of conversion
  • make this work very easily by filling just a couple of form information

  Identify valuable referrers that you did not see before

  You probably have hundreds or even thousands of different sources listed within the referrer reports. We also guess that you have the feeling that it is always the same referrers which are credited of conversions.
  Guess what, those data are probably biased or at least are not telling you the whole story.
  Why? Because by default, Matomo (Piwik) only attributes all credit to the last referrer.

  

  It is likely that many non credited sources played a role in the conversion process as well as people often visit your website several times before converting and they may come from different referrers.

  This is exactly where attribution modeling comes into play. With attribution modeling, you can decide which touchpoint you want to study. For example, you can choose to give credit to all the referrers a single visitor came from each time the user visits your website, and not only look at the last one. Without this feature, chances are, that you have spent too much money and / or efforts on the wrong referrer channels in the past because many referrers that contributed to conversions were ignored. Based on the insights you get by applying different attribution models, you can make better decisions on where to shift your marketing spending and efforts.

  Invest in potential new partners

  Once you apply different attribution models, you will find out that you need to consider a new list of referrers which you before either over- or under-estimated in terms of how much they contributed to your conversions. You probably did not identify those sources before because Matomo (Piwik) shows only the last referrer before a conversion. But you can now also look at what these newly discovered referrers are saying about your company, looking for any advertising programs they may offer, getting in contact with the owner of the website, and more.

  Apply up to 6 different attribution models

  By default, Matomo (Piwik) is attributing the conversion to the last referrer only. With attribution modeling you can analyze 6 different models:

  • Last Interaction: the conversion is attributed to the last referrer, even if it is a direct access.
  • Last Non-Direct: the conversion is attributed to the last referrer, but not in the case of a direct access.
  • First Interaction: the conversion is attributed to the first referrer which brought you the visit.
  • Linear: whatever the number of referrers which brought you the conversion, they will all get the same value.
  • Position Based: first and last referrer will be attributed 40% each the conversion value, the remaining 60% is divided between the rest of the referrers.
  • Time Decay: this attribution model means that the closer to the date of the conversion is, the more your last referrers will get credit.

  Those attribution models will enable you to analyze all your referrers deeply and increase your conversions.

  Let’s look at an example where we are comparing two models: “last interaction” and “first interaction”. Our goal is to identify whether some referrers that we are currently considering as less important, are finally playing a serious role in the total amount of conversions:

  

  Comparing Last Interaction model to First Interaction model

  Here it is interesting to observe that the website www.hongkiat.com is bringing almost 90% conversion more with the first interaction model rather than the last one.

  As a result we can look at this website and take the following actions:

  • have a look at the message on this website
  • look at opportunities to change the message
  • look at opportunities to display extra marketing messages
  • get in contact with the owner to identify any other communication opportunities

  The Multi Channel Attribution report

  Attribution modeling in Matomo (Piwik) does not require you to add any tracking code. The only thing you need is to install the plugin and let the magic happen.
  Simple as pie is the word you should keep in mind for this feature. Once installed, you will find the report within the goal section, just above the goals you created:

  

  The Multi Attribution menu

  There you can select the attribution model you would like to apply or compare.

  Attribution modeling is not just about playing with a new report. It is above all an opportunity to increase the number of conversions by identifying referrers that you may have not recognized as valuable in the past. To grow your business, it is crucial to identify the most (and least) successful channels correctly so you can spend your time and money wisely.

  Learn more about Multi Channel Conversion Attribution

  The post Make better marketing decisions with attribution modeling appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.

• How to measure the performance of a newsletter (or any email) with Piwik

  19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  To be able to grow your business, it is crucial to track all your marketing efforts. This includes all newsletters and emails that you share with people outside of your business. Otherwise, you won’t be able to know which of your daily efforts are yielding results.

  Are you wondering if it is possible to track the performance of an emailing campaign in Piwik efficiently? Would you like to know if it is technically easy? No worries, here is a “How to” tutorial showing you how easily you can track an emailing in Piwik properly.

  Different tracking levels for different needs

  There are many things that you may be interested to track, for example:

  

  1. How many users opened your email
  2. How many users interacted with the links in your email
  3. How many users interacted on your website through your email

  Let’s have a look at each of these levels.

  Step 1 – Tracking email and newsletter openings in Piwik

  Tracking email openings requires to add an HTML code to your newsletter. It works through what we call a tracking pixel, a tiny image of 1×1 that is transparent so the user will not be able to see it.
  In order to install it, here is an example of what this code looks like:

  <img src="https://piwik.example.com/piwik.php?idsite=YOUR_PIWIK_WEBSITE_ID&rec=1&bots=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Femail-opened%2Fnewsletter_XYZ&action_name=Email%20opened&_rcn=internal%20email%20name&_rck=newsletter_XYZ" style="border:0;” alt="" />
  

  The Piwik tracking pixel explained

  The above URL is composed of the following URL parameters which are part of our Tracking API:

  • idsite: Corresponds to the ID of the website you would like to track.
  • rec: You need to have rec=1 in order for the request to be actually recorded.
  • bots: Set it to 1 to include all the connections made to this request, bots included.
  • url: corresponds to the URL you would like to display in Piwik every time the email is opened.
  • action_name: This is the page name you would like to be tracked when the email is opened.
  • _rcn: The name you would like to give to your campaign.
  • _rck: The keyword you may like to use in order to summarize the content of your newsletter.

  You may have noticed some special characters here such as “%20”, “%2F”. That’s because the URL is encoded. We strongly recommend you to do so in order for your tracking not to break. Many tools are available on the web in order to encode your URLs such as https://www.urlencoder.org/.

  If you would like to access the previous tracking code easily, keep in mind that you can always find the tracking code generator within the “Piwik admin panel → Tracking code”:

  

  You can find more information about it on our guide at: How do I track how many users open and read my newsletter emails (using a pixel / beacon)?

  As a result, the information will be pushed as following for any user who opens your email:

  

  To not bias your regular page views on your website with newsletter openings, we recommend tracking newsletter openings into a new website.

  Tracking even more data: the user ID example

  You can go deeper in your URL tracking by inserting other parameters such as the user id if you have this information within your emailing database. One of the main benefit of tracking the User ID is to connect data across multiple devices and browsers for a given user.

  You only need to add the following parameter &uid=XXX where XXX equals the dynamic value of the user ID:

  

  Make sure that UID from your emailing provider is the same as the one used on your website in order for your data to be consistent.

  Important note: some email providers are loading email messages by default which results in an opening even if the user did not actually open the email.

  Step 2 – Measure the clicks within your emailing

  Tracking clicks within an email lets you know with which content readers interacted the most. We recommend tracking all links in all your emails as a campaign, whether it is a newsletter, a custom support email, an email invoice, etc. You might be surprised to see which of your emails lead to conversions and if they don’t, try to tweak those emails, so they might in the future.

  Tracking clicks This works thanks to URL campaign tracking. In order to perform this action, you will need to add Piwik URL parameters to all your existing link URLs:

  • Website URL: for example “www.your-website.com”.
  • Campaign name: for example “pk_campaign=emailing”. Represents the name you would like to give to your campaign.
  • Campaign keyword: for example “pk_keyword=name-of-your-article”. Represents the name you would like to give to your content.
  • Campaign source: for example “pk_source=newsletter”. Represents the name of the referrer.
  • Campaign medium: for example “pk_medium=email”. Represents the type of referrer you are using.
  • Campaign content: for example “pk_content=title”. Represents the type of content.

  You can find more information about campaign url tracking in our “Tracking marketing campaigns with Piwik” guide.

  Here is a sample showing you how you can differentiate some links in a newsletter, all pointing to the same URL:

  

  Once you have added these URL parameters to each of your link, Piwik will clearly indicate the referrer of this specific campaign when a user clicks on a link in the newsletter and visits your website.

  Important note: if you do not track your campaigns, it will result in a bad interpretation of your data within Piwik as you will get webmail services or direct entries as referrer instead of your newsletter campaign.

  Step 3 – Measure emailing performances on your website

  Thanks to Piwik URL campaign parameters, you can now clearly identify the traffic brought through your emailing. You can now specifically isolate users who come from emails by creating a segment:

  

  Once done, you can either have a look at each user specifically through the visitor log report or analyze it as a whole within the rest of the reports.

  You can even measure your return on investment directly if goals have been defined. In order to know more about how to track goals within Piwik.

  Did you like this article?

  If you enjoyed reading this article, do not hesitate to share it around you. Moreover, if there are any topics you would like to write us about in particular, just drop us an email and we will be more than happy to write about it.

• How to measure the performance of a newsletter (or any email) with Matomo

  19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft

  To be able to grow your business, it is crucial to track all your marketing efforts. This includes all newsletters and emails that you share with people outside of your business. Otherwise, you won’t be able to know which of your daily efforts are yielding results.

  Are you wondering if it is possible to track the performance of an emailing campaign in Matomo (Piwik) efficiently? Would you like to know if it is technically easy? No worries, here is a “How to” tutorial showing you how easily you can track an emailing in Matomo properly.

  Different tracking levels for different needs

  There are many things that you may be interested to track, for example:

  

  1. How many users opened your email
  2. How many users interacted with the links in your email
  3. How many users interacted on your website through your email

  Let’s have a look at each of these levels.

  Step 1 – Tracking email and newsletter openings in Matomo

  Tracking email openings requires to add an HTML code to your newsletter. It works through what we call a tracking pixel, a tiny image of 1×1 that is transparent so the user will not be able to see it.
  In order to install it, here is an example of what this code looks like:

  <img src="https://piwik.example.com/piwik.php?idsite=YOUR_PIWIK_WEBSITE_ID&rec=1&bots=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Femail-opened%2Fnewsletter_XYZ&action_name=Email%20opened&_rcn=internal%20email%20name&_rck=newsletter_XYZ" style="border:0;” alt="" />
  

  The Matomo tracking pixel explained

  The above URL is composed of the following URL parameters which are part of our Tracking API:

  • idsite: Corresponds to the ID of the website you would like to track.
  • rec: You need to have rec=1 in order for the request to be actually recorded.
  • bots: Set it to 1 to include all the connections made to this request, bots included.
  • url: corresponds to the URL you would like to display in Matomo (Piwik) every time the email is opened.
  • action_name: This is the page name you would like to be tracked when the email is opened.
  • _rcn: The name you would like to give to your campaign.
  • _rck: The keyword you may like to use in order to summarize the content of your newsletter.

  You may have noticed some special characters here such as “%20”, “%2F”. That’s because the URL is encoded. We strongly recommend you to do so in order for your tracking not to break. Many tools are available on the web in order to encode your URLs such as https://www.urlencoder.org/.

  If you would like to access the previous tracking code easily, keep in mind that you can always find the tracking code generator within the “Matomo admin panel → Tracking code”:

  

  You can find more information about it on our guide at: How do I track how many users open and read my newsletter emails (using a pixel / beacon)?

  As a result, the information will be pushed as following for any user who opens your email:

  

  To not bias your regular page views on your website with newsletter openings, we recommend tracking newsletter openings into a new website.

  Tracking even more data: the user ID example

  You can go deeper in your URL tracking by inserting other parameters such as the user id if you have this information within your emailing database. One of the main benefit of tracking the User ID is to connect data across multiple devices and browsers for a given user.

  You only need to add the following parameter &uid=XXX where XXX equals the dynamic value of the user ID:

  

  Make sure that UID from your emailing provider is the same as the one used on your website in order for your data to be consistent.

  Important note: some email providers are loading email messages by default which results in an opening even if the user did not actually open the email.

  Step 2 – Measure the clicks within your emailing

  Tracking clicks within an email lets you know with which content readers interacted the most. We recommend tracking all links in all your emails as a campaign, whether it is a newsletter, a custom support email, an email invoice, etc. You might be surprised to see which of your emails lead to conversions and if they don’t, try to tweak those emails, so they might in the future.

  Tracking clicks This works thanks to URL campaign tracking. In order to perform this action, you will need to add Matomo (Piwik) URL parameters to all your existing link URLs:

  • Website URL: for example “www.your-website.com”.
  • Campaign name: for example “pk_campaign=emailing”. Represents the name you would like to give to your campaign.
  • Campaign keyword: for example “pk_keyword=name-of-your-article”. Represents the name you would like to give to your content.
  • Campaign source: for example “pk_source=newsletter”. Represents the name of the referrer.
  • Campaign medium: for example “pk_medium=email”. Represents the type of referrer you are using.
  • Campaign content: for example “pk_content=title”. Represents the type of content.

  You can find more information about campaign url tracking in our “Tracking marketing campaigns with Matomo” guide.

  Here is a sample showing you how you can differentiate some links in a newsletter, all pointing to the same URL:

  

  Once you have added these URL parameters to each of your link, Matomo (Piwik) will clearly indicate the referrer of this specific campaign when a user clicks on a link in the newsletter and visits your website.

  Important note: if you do not track your campaigns, it will result in a bad interpretation of your data within Matomo (Piwik) as you will get webmail services or direct entries as referrer instead of your newsletter campaign.

  Step 3 – Measure emailing performances on your website

  Thanks to Matomo (Piwik) URL campaign parameters, you can now clearly identify the traffic brought through your emailing. You can now specifically isolate users who come from emails by creating a segment:

  

  Once done, you can either have a look at each user specifically through the visitor log report or analyze it as a whole within the rest of the reports.

  You can even measure your return on investment directly if goals have been defined. In order to know more about how to track goals within Matomo (Piwik).

  Did you like this article?

  If you enjoyed reading this article, do not hesitate to share it around you. Moreover, if there are any topics you would like to write us about in particular, just drop us an email and we will be more than happy to write about it.

  The post How to measure the performance of a newsletter (or any email) with Matomo appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.

• How to track Google AdWords campaigns with Piwik

  19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft

  In 2016, Google AdWords was the most popular ad service on earth. As a result, it may be your first source for ad spending. Are you interested in knowing whether you are making a profit out of it? Would you like to know how to track users coming from AdWords with Piwik efficiently? This is what this article is about.

  

  What you need to know about Google AdWords

  By default, each ad you create in Google AdWords is not tracked. Even worse than that, every click on your ad is identified in Piwik as an organic result coming from Google with the following value: “Keyword not defined”.

  To make it simple, if you do not track your AdWords campaigns both your paid and organic traffic will be biased within your Piwik account. It will be impossible for you to measure your return on investment and it means that you are throwing your money down the drain.

  In order to avoid this, we will show you how to track Google AdWords traffic into Piwik.

  How to track paid Google AdWords campaigns into Piwik

  If you want to analyze Google AdWords campaigns within Piwik properly, you need to add additional tracking parameters to the final URL of each of your ads.

  We recommend using the following tool to add the needed additional tracking parameters: https://piwik.org/docs/tracking-campaigns-url-builder/

  You will then be able to push additional data to Piwik such as:

  • pk_campaign: the name of your ad campaign
  • pk_kwd: the keyword associated to this campaign
  • pk_source: the source of your campaign
  • pk_medium: the type of source, in our case either cpc, cpm, cpa
  • pk_content: the content of your ad

  If your campaign URL looks like this: https://your-website.com/, your campaign URL will then look like this after adding the campaign parameters:

  https://your-website.com/?pk_campaign=Name-Of-Your-Campaign&pk_kwd=Your-Keyword&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content=My-Ad-Headline

  As each ad URL can be fired by different keywords and can correspond to different campaigns or headlines, you will need to customize the campaign parameters for each URL.

  Customizing all of your URLs individually would take you a lot of time under circumstances. That’s why you should know, that each URL parameter can be filled automatically in AdWords with a feature called “Tracking template”.

  Simplifying the campaign URL parameters with tracking templates

  You can define tracking templates either at the account, campaign or ad group level. For example, by using a tracking template at the account level, all your campaigns will have the same landing page with the URL parameters you defined in the tracking template. By defining it at the campaign level, it means that all your ad groups within the campaign will have the same landing page and so on and so forth. Any tracking template defined in a campaign, will overwrite a tracking template defined at the account level.

  Tracking template at the account level

  To edit the template at the account level, you need to click on “Settings”, then click on the “Account” settings tab and define your tracking template pattern. For example:

  https://your-website.com/?url={lpurl}&pk_campaign=AdWords&pk_kwd=Your-Keyword&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content=My-Ad-Headline

  

  This will apply to all your URLs within your account. So it is only useful if your website domain is the same across all your ads. The URL parameter is compulsory here.

  It can be limiting to have a static value for “pk_campaign” and “pk_kwd” so Google allows you to use dynamic insertion, such as follows:

  https://your-landing-page.com/?url={lpurl}&pk_campaign={campaignid}&pk_kwd={keyword}&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content={creative}

  The “{keyword}” means that the data is automatically replaced with the keyword which fired the ad within your account.

  Visit the following page if you want to know more about the different dynamic tags that AdWords supports: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6305348#urlinsertion

  Tracking template at the campaign level

  If you wish to define a tracking template at the campaign level, you will find this option within the “Campaign” settings under the campaign URL options:

  

  Tracking template at the Ad Group level

  You can also set it at the Ad Group level within the “Ad Group” settings:

  

  As Google mentions: “If you set up URL options at the campaign level, ad group level, or ad level, those settings will override the account-level options“.

  Now that your URLs are properly configured, you will be able to analyze AdWords traffic performances within Piwik once a click is coming from those sources.

  

  Did you like this article? If yes, do not hesitate to share it or give us your feedback about the topic you would like us to write about.

• How to track Google AdWords campaigns with Matomo

  19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft

  In 2016, Google AdWords was the most popular ad service on earth. As a result, it may be your first source for ad spending. Are you interested in knowing whether you are making a profit out of it? Would you like to know how to track users coming from AdWords with Matomo (Piwik) efficiently? This is what this article is about.

  

  What you need to know about Google AdWords

  By default, each ad you create in Google AdWords is not tracked. Even worse than that, every click on your ad is identified in Matomo (Piwik) as an organic result coming from Google with the following value: “Keyword not defined”.

  To make it simple, if you do not track your AdWords campaigns both your paid and organic traffic will be biased within your Matomo (Piwik) account. It will be impossible for you to measure your return on investment and it means that you are throwing your money down the drain.

  In order to avoid this, we will show you how to track Google AdWords traffic into Matomo (Piwik).

  How to track paid Google AdWords campaigns into Matomo

  If you want to analyze Google AdWords campaigns within Matomo (Piwik) properly, you need to add additional tracking parameters to the final URL of each of your ads.

  We recommend using the following tool to add the needed additional tracking parameters: https://matomo.org/docs/tracking-campaigns-url-builder/

  You will then be able to push additional data to Matomo (Piwik) such as:

  • pk_campaign: the name of your ad campaign
  • pk_kwd: the keyword associated to this campaign
  • pk_source: the source of your campaign
  • pk_medium: the type of source, in our case either cpc, cpm, cpa
  • pk_content: the content of your ad

  If your campaign URL looks like this: https://your-website.com/, your campaign URL will then look like this after adding the campaign parameters:

  https://your-website.com/?pk_campaign=Name-Of-Your-Campaign&pk_kwd=Your-Keyword&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content=My-Ad-Headline

  As each ad URL can be fired by different keywords and can correspond to different campaigns or headlines, you will need to customize the campaign parameters for each URL.

  Customizing all of your URLs individually would take you a lot of time under circumstances. That’s why you should know, that each URL parameter can be filled automatically in AdWords with a feature called “Tracking template”.

  Simplifying the campaign URL parameters with tracking templates

  You can define tracking templates either at the account, campaign or ad group level. For example, by using a tracking template at the account level, all your campaigns will have the same landing page with the URL parameters you defined in the tracking template. By defining it at the campaign level, it means that all your ad groups within the campaign will have the same landing page and so on and so forth. Any tracking template defined in a campaign, will overwrite a tracking template defined at the account level.

  Tracking template at the account level

  To edit the template at the account level, you need to click on “Settings”, then click on the “Account” settings tab and define your tracking template pattern. For example:

  https://your-website.com/?url={lpurl}&pk_campaign=AdWords&pk_kwd=Your-Keyword&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content=My-Ad-Headline

  

  This will apply to all your URLs within your account. So it is only useful if your website domain is the same across all your ads. The URL parameter is compulsory here.

  It can be limiting to have a static value for “pk_campaign” and “pk_kwd” so Google allows you to use dynamic insertion, such as follows:

  https://your-landing-page.com/?url={lpurl}&pk_campaign={campaignid}&pk_kwd={keyword}&pk_source=google&pk_medium=cpc&pk_content={creative}

  The “{keyword}” means that the data is automatically replaced with the keyword which fired the ad within your account.

  Visit the following page if you want to know more about the different dynamic tags that AdWords supports: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6305348#urlinsertion

  Tracking template at the campaign level

  If you wish to define a tracking template at the campaign level, you will find this option within the “Campaign” settings under the campaign URL options:

  

  Tracking template at the Ad Group level

  You can also set it at the Ad Group level within the “Ad Group” settings:

  

  As Google mentions: “If you set up URL options at the campaign level, ad group level, or ad level, those settings will override the account-level options“.

  Now that your URLs are properly configured, you will be able to analyze AdWords traffic performances within Matomo (Piwik) once a click is coming from those sources.

  

  Did you like this article? If yes, do not hesitate to share it or give us your feedback about the topic you would like us to write about.