Learn how a touchpoint management solution can help you navigate the most frustrating limitations of campaign tracking.

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Overcome the 8
Most Frustrating
Campaign Tracking
Limitations
A quick note before we dive in: For campaign
and touchpoint tracking, most organizations use
UTM or CID tracking—many using a combination
of the two. The limitations that follow sometimes
involve one or the other, but for the purposes of
this post we’ll focus primarily on organizations
grounded in using UTM parameters.
If you’ve ever sat at your computer and stared at your
screen in frustration because your campaign tracking
system isn’t giving you what you need, then believe
us when we say you are not alone. We’ve rounded up
the most common campaign tracking limitations that
not only stand in the way of many organizations get-
ting to the high-fidelity, actionable data they need to
achieve their business goals, but that probably also
make your work life far less efficient than it should
be. Plus, we’ve provided information on how you can
overcome these limitations with an enterprise touch-
point management solution.
1 Manual, time-intensive,
and error-prone tracking
Using spreadsheets and similar tools inevitably means
manual, time-consuming tracking processes that are
fraught with human error. Different users employ
different syntax and nomenclature for the exact same
things. Even the most well-intentioned home-grown
tools founded on carefully designed tracking templates
often lack process governance, have cumbersome user
workflows, and require significant resources to main-
tain and enhance. Far too often this means that gover-
nance breaks down, processes are shortcutted (if not
ignored altogether), and upkeep either becomes far too
expensive or neglected.
Without the automation inherent to integrations into
AdTech and MarTech platforms, creating and editing
tracking IDs, metadata, and tracking URLs in these
types of systems is a very cumbersome process (which
usually means it is done inconsistently and often isn’t
done at all).
Regardless of whether you are using spreadsheet
templates, shared Google Sheets, Salesforce campaigns,
web analytics classifications, custom-built internal tools,
or similar approaches to facilitate your tracking and
metadata management—at some point all are likely to
cause friction, limit efficiency, and prevent you from re-
alizing the full potential of your measurement program.
Replace manual tracking with automation
Utilizing an integrated touchpoint management solu-
tion will allow you to take advantage of automation
when connected to key technology platforms. Track-
ing IDs can be dynamically created and appended to
touchpoint URLs. Metadata can be automatically rec-
ognized and passed between systems. This will save
you from the errors and wasted time that naturally
accompany a purely manual tracking effort.
Here are the most common issues you’ll likely run into
and how to solve them:
With a Touchpoint
Management Solution

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2 Data loss due to URL truncation
‍Any time you use long tracking IDs—or in the case of UTM
parameters, several long tracking IDs—you risk the values
getting truncated due to browser limitations if the URL is too
long. Unfortunately, when this occurs, tracking inconsisten-
cy and misalignment can cause notable data loss, seriously
hampering the accuracy of a campaign’s calculated ROI.
Eliminate data loss by managing shortened URLs at
scale with automation
You can utilize a touchpoint management solution to easily
create and manage dynamic URLs that are shortened to
avoid truncation, helping you avoid data loss. Shorter,
cleaner URLs also provide for a better end-user experience.
Additionally, a touchpoint management solution will allow
you to create and manage these tracking URLs at scale with
the help of automation, allowing you to save human effort.
Dynamic URLs are often needed as part of your campaign or
experience. Separate tools are required to create vanity URLs,
shortened URLs, etc. causing a disjointed, error-prone experience
where tracking parameters or IDs are often not copied over cor-
rectly or left out entirely.
Get rid of inconvenient URL processes by creating shortened
URLs within a single tool
In addition to using a touchpoint management solution to man-
age URL length and consistency, you can also shorten URLs to fit
more in line with your branding goals and enhance your customer
experiences. The ability to accomplish this with automation in a
single tool allows you to cut down on human error, save time, and
easily ensure URL accuracy on an ongoing basis.
3 Inconvenient process
for creating tracking-based
vanity/shortened URLs

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4 Inflexible data that can’t be updated
When using hard-coded text parameters such as UTM, you can’t easily update those values after traffic has been gener-
ated and the data collected. So even if a mistake was made or if the values are updated post-campaign launch, by nature
of the system design, your data ends up too rigid to be updated when necessary.
For example, imagine you have a naming structure for your paid advertising campaigns that changed when new market-
ing leadership joined your company at the beginning of the year. “Campaign1-Brand-SEM” in 2019 has data you’d like to
align with “CampaignA-BR-PPC” in 2020 to see year-over-year performance metrics. Unfortunately, because your UTM_
Campaign values are hardcoded, your Campaign report has multiple line items for each of hundreds of campaigns, and
your analytics team has to go through some significant data/reporting gymnastics to clean up the mess. This could have
all been avoided had you used a single unified tracking ID instead of a hard-coded campaign parameter.
Eliminate inflexible data by controlling data values—
especially UTM values—on an ongoing basis
An effective touchpoint management solution allows you to
maintain complete control and flexibility over your dimen-
sional values (metadata) by basing all tracking on a universal
tracking ID. All underlying attributes (such as Campaign Name
in the example above) are mapped to this single unifying “key,”
while giving you full flexibility to update values or completely
redesign your reporting taxonomy at any time. This design
puts you in a position to update your data values when and
where you need to, both going forward and retroactively, so
you can pivot quickly and obtain the insights you need while
maintaining accuracy.

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‍Basing your performance measurement program on UTM tracking parameters makes it difficult to establish a com-
plete, granular marketing taxonomy beyond the five basic parameters introduced more than two decades ago! Yet
every organization needs insights beyond just the basic aggregate levels of Medium, Source, Campaign, and Content.
(Don’t even get me started on how horribly the “Content” dimension has been defined over the past 22 years… that’s a
rant for another day.)
Even for those using more advanced tracking methodologies such as complex CID parameters and passing them into
a web analytics solution are limited in the number of classifications they can apply to a single variable. (Google alone
records more metadata about paid search ads than can be mapped to an analytics campaign variable—and that’s only
one publisher in one channel.)
Stop placing false limitations on the number of attributes you track for your customer-facing touchpoints
An enterprise touchpoint management solution will allow you to collect in-depth metadata about all aspects of your
paid, owned, and earned touchpoints—without limitation. Yes this includes high-level dimensions such as channel,
publisher, and campaign. But it should also allow you to drill down into granular data and insights that uncover your
customers’ behavior—everything from asset types to calls to action, ad groups to placements, promoted products to
targeted audiences—so you can know exactly what’s working and why.
5 Insufficient campaign and
touchpoint tracking attributes

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When using ID tracking, the associated attributes must be captured from AdTech and MarTech platforms, or created
manually. The data must then be prepared and uploaded into your web analytics and data warehouse environments.
This process is often, once again, manual, time-intensive, error-prone, and—you guessed it—therefore often doesn’t
happen well, if at all. When it does happen, it’s not done in real time, making the resulting insights incomplete when
needed or irrelevant once finally available.
Do away with manual uploads by utilizing integrations for seamless data synchronization
Strala by ObservePoint’s Touchpoints solution integrates directly with top AdTech, MarTech, web analytics providers,
custom data warehouses, and visualization environments. These integrations allow you to synchronize your data auto-
matically on an ongoing basis, helping you save time and resources, while ensuring your insights are up-to-date when
and where you need them.
6 Manual, time-intensive uploads to
web analytics and data warehouses

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If you answered true to either, then you’re just like the majority of marketers. In either scenario, no single source of truth
with a single taxonomy exists for your marketing and experience data. As a result, you end up with duplication of efforts,
missing attributes, misaligned data, and time wasted cleansing combined data sets in an attempt to retrofit them into a
single composite long after the data has been collected in an (often futile) attempt to unify it.
Ask any data scientist what they spend the majority of their time doing, and for nearly all of them it isn’t actually data
science (which is what we pay them top dollar to do!). It is time spent in data preparation—the mundane task of cleaning
up incomplete, inconsistent, misaligned data so they can eventually (hopefully!) get to the value-add of their core craft.
Here’s a quick poll for you:
• True or false. Your company uses multiple spreadsheets across teams incorporating different taxonomies.
• True or false. Your company’s campaign tracking standards don’t solve for the taxonomy inconsistencies that exist
between all of your Ad and MarTech platforms.
7 Inconsistent data standards
Move past inconsistent data by pre-defining data standards
You need the ability to pre-define your data standards with
a consistent enterprise-wide taxonomy before you ever
start collecting data, and a full-featured touchpoint man-
agement solution will help you do exactly that. Creating
these predefined data standards allows all teams across
your organization to align behind common taxonomy,
helping you avoid data inconsistencies across functions
and individuals. It also helps you save vast amounts of
time and resources previously lost to “data wrangling”
once data has been collected, while unlocking additional
insights not previously available when working within the
confines of siloed data.

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8 Bad links
All too often, campaigns go live with “bad” links—404 errors, unseen redirects stripping off vital tracking parameters, blank
pages, etc.—or links go bad over time. (The law of entropy is real!)
Bad URLs can occur due to any number of mistakes, including incorrect
link syntax, low/no governance in URL monitoring, laziness, or good old
fashion human error.
Companies spend precious budget driving traffic to nowhere, not because they like flushing marketing dollars down the
drain, but simply because automating URL verification isn’t possible through their existing systems. Yes, mistakes happen;
but your performance measurement practice should not have to languish in mediocrity because of them.
Crush bad links by automatically verifying your touchpoint URLs
A touchpoint management solution gives you the ability to automatically verify every step of your campaign—including
URLs—on an ongoing basis. Doing so will allow you to ensure your URLs are always functioning appropriately, getting your
customers to their desired destinations and providing you the data you need to optimize those customer experiences.
Validate all the data on your website with ObservePoint
In conjunction with using Strala by Observepoint’s touchpoint manage-
ment solution to overcome campaign tracking limitations, you can also
use ObservePoint’s data governance software to validate that all the
MarTech on your site is functioning properly and delivering the ROI you
need to grow your business.

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So, are you stuck using inefficient and laborious processes you
hate and that don’t work well? We can help.
To see how Strala by ObservePoint can save you time and eliminate
frustration from your current approach to touchpoint and metadata
management, schedule a demo.
Schedule a Demo