When it comes to digital marketing programs, companies can spend millions of dollars. And hundreds of thousands of dollars more on things like business intelligence, analytics, and expensive data visualization tools.

Align Your Tracking Taxonomy in 3 Steps

But so often, they don’t get value for their investment. So how can you make sure you get value from your marketing strategy?

In this post, we outline how you can maximize marketing returns by aligning your tracking taxonomy. We will show you how to align your taxonomy in 3 simple steps. With these steps in place, you will be able to maximize your marketing rewards.

What’s the Problem?

If you’re a senior marketing leader. And you’ve noticed you’re not getting value for money from your investment inexpensive digital marketing tools.

Then you know something is wrong. But what is the problem that means the investment isn’t getting the returns you expect?

Ultimately, the issue is likely to stem from incomplete insights. Typically, this stems from marketing decisions being made by teams working in silos.

That is to say, teams within a single business might be running marketing campaigns with their own taxonomies. This means they can track the performance of campaigns within their teams.

But when it comes to looking across teams. Or at the enterprise level. It becomes hard or even impossible to track campaign performance.

Within these teams themselves, they may be operating standardized tracking systems. But if people outside their team are not following the same approach to labeling attributes.

Then the downstream impact is ultimately one of the insights being lost at the enterprise level. Given that your analytics are key to understanding success in your marketing campaigns. Losing valuable insights lowers your returns on investment.

Solving the Problem

All your marketing teams need to be using the same taxonomy consistently across your business. This will take time to establish. But will ensure that you are able to capture insights that span your business.

Aligning Your Tracking Taxonomy

No matter the channels or platforms the campaigns are being run on. Or who is running them.

When you don’t miss insights. Your data becomes more valuable. Rather than analysts having to waste their time cleaning data. And having to drop large swathes of data due to unclear and inconsistent labeling.

They can spend most of their time focusing on delivering insights from data they know they can trust. And this can be used to optimize your approach moving forward. But how do you do this?

Here we outline 3 steps to align your tracking taxonomy:

1. Share Goals & Reporting Needs

It is vital that your analysts understand the business goals of each of your marketing teams. They will also need to consider the reporting needs of each team individually, as these needs may be different.

Ideally, your analyst needs to spend time with your teams to get a good grasp of this.

Bringing your analyst/s and marketing teams together creates space for better communication. As well as building in enterprise-wide oversight. Your analyst can ask key questions to every team.

Deep dive into each team’s aims and objectives. Understand the platforms they use. Consider their campaign roadmaps. And understand how they want to, do, and will measure successes with the data available to them.

At this stage, it’s a good idea to get teams and analysts to consider together what they want to get out of reporting. This includes what they already get. And what they might hope to get in the future.

Often companies think they can just pay for a taxonomy tool and expect the value to come out the other end. But the process of fostering communication is what will actually help you reap the rewards of taxonomy tools.

By bringing people together you gather all the relevant data required across your marketing teams. It also helps when it comes to bringing teams with you with a single unified taxonomy.

If you don’t take this time in the beginning, then you will end up creating a taxonomy that doesn’t work for everyone. Which only leads to pushback in the future. This step takes time, but it’s vital for the successful alignment of your tracking taxonomy.

2. Map Current Taxonomies

Before thinking about a unified taxonomy, you need to understand things as they actually are. This means mapping out the taxonomies of each of your marketing teams.

Documenting current metadata requirements and tracking codes as they are currently used. And noting down specific requirements and parameters used to track advert and creative asset publishing.

If any of your teams use agencies, then you will also need to meet directly with the agency to map their workflows. This includes documenting how campaign elements and creative assets move between your business and the agency.

As often tracking gaps appear when this is not understood. Ideally, any agency should be able to provide the taxonomy they are using to help with your mapping.

Mapping everything out in totality is vital to draw together exactly how each team is operating. You also need to understand how labels are defined.

And make sure not to assume the same definitions are always applied to the same label when used by different teams. The map of how things are is key to being able to align your tracking taxonomy.

3. Agree on Labeling of Data Field Collection

It is important to have a number of parameters that align across all channels and teams. This means at least five parameters that are always consistent in structure. Be that for campaign names or for marketing objectives.

By ensuring there are cross-channel, platform, and team parameters that are always consistent it becomes possible to learn about your multi-channel attribution.

Typically it is fairly simple to find at least 5 common data points beneficial across all your teams. And it isn’t necessary to have the total alignment for every possible variable. Indeed, not every variable will be available on every platform or channel.

And many may not be useful to all teams. However, ensuring there are at least 5 cross-team-and-channel parameters will be a major boost for your analytics platform. And what you can learn from them.

That being said, this relates to metadata related to your tracking codes. Not your tracking codes themselves. Indeed, your tracking codes should be part of an enterprise-wide taxonomy.

By maximizing the potential of your analytics platform you will be able to identify your most efficient channel. For example, which channel is most effective when it comes to driving your conversion rates.

With trust in the data. And cross-team alignment. But reasonable flexibility is built-in from the start. You will soon see results and value from following these 3 steps for an aligned tracking taxonomy.

Communication as Process Is Key for Successful Tracking

The 3 steps above will help to ensure your tracking taxonomy alignment can be a success. By communicating across all teams early. You can establish what already works well across teams.

And make sure you bring teams with you with your alignment taxonomy. Often, businesses find they only need to slightly tweak how teams are operating. But capturing this early is key to future success.

Once you have gone through the 3 steps, you will be ready to benefit from a taxonomy tool. And you’ll soon start to see the returns on investment that will have been lacking before establishing enterprise-wide processes.

Conclusion

These tools will also help you embed agreed data standards across your business so that your taxonomy remains clean and consistent into the future. But they are not a golden bullet and you need to get the groundwork right first.

Communicate with all your teams early on. And you will make roll-out easier and more effective and efficient in the long run. With an aligned tracking taxonomy, you will be able to build in campaign successes.

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