If you’re running numerous advertising campaigns over various media and channels, it can be very difficult to extract and aggregate the relevant data necessary to construct a good view of your spending, the media mix, and the performance of campaigns relative to each other.
To spare you time and pain, the adCenter Analytics team decided to bring you a new visualization called the Campaign Timeline. Its main purpose is to visualize your advertising effort and campaign performance over the last 12 months.
To start this report, navigate to the Goal section from the left-hand menu bar and choose Campaign Timeline.
The reports contains two sections, detailed below:
(1) The overall view on top represents the list of all campaigns run within the last 12 months.
Each bar shown in this view represents a campaign. The color of the campaign maps to the type of media, or channel, used (check the legend below the graph for the mappings).
If you want more details about a specific campaign you can simply hover over it. Hovering displays a legend containing information relevant to that campaign: total visits, conversion, revenue, etc.
(2) The detailed view below provides you with daily details of visits and conversions for the campaigns highlighted in the overall view. This highlight can be moved by simply grabbing the associated rectangle in the overall view.
You can view the details for each of the different campaigns by simply clicking on the rectangle that depicts that campaign. The detailed view can also be navigated directly by grabbing it, and moving your mouse in the direction you want to shift your view.
For each campaign, the detailed view provides insights on how the visit and conversion trends evolved during the campaign timeframe. The red bars represent your conversions and the blue bars represent your visits. When you hover over the bars for a specific day you obtain additional information about the exact visit and conversion values for that day.
The above gives you a good overview of what was your marketing focus across the year, what your media mix looked like, and how each campaign performed on a daily basis.
So can this report provide an instant view of the performance of each campaign in relation to visits, conversions, revenue?
Yes! Simply select the "Heat Map" option from the Coloring menu and then select the metric you want to see.
You can now navigate the chart—you can view the details for the campaigns of particular interest (top conversion performers, visit under performers, etc.), you can view various metrics via the heat map, or you can switch back to campaign type to view the media mix.
You can now navigate the chart: viewing the details for the campaigns of particular interest (top conversion performers, visit under performers ...), changing heat map metric or switching back to media mix.
To start using the Campaign Timeline report you will need to have advertising campaigns defined for your profile. To start tracking advertising campaigns you can use the creation and/or importing campaign options found in the profile settings.
You can find these options by:
(1) Browsing to the profiles list
(2) Selecting "Manage" on your profile
(3) Navigating to "Manage Campaigns"
We would love to hear your thoughts on the Campaign Timeline report. Tell us what you think via comments on this post or via a post in the forum.