How do I correctly use the tracking code dimension for campaigns?

Hi Curtis,

Tracking Code or Campaign Click Throughs are the same thing, it's just that older suites have the older name, and newer suites have the newer name.. both are registered as the standard eVar0. All eVars (including the eVar0) have an instance metric associated to them, it's likely called Campaign Click Through Instances (basically the name of the dimension plus "Instances"). It's not actually possible to disable these instances, they are part of the core behaviour of eVars.

So normally the Tracking Code (whatever it's called) has a 1 week attribution.. while you are free to change this, I would not go any lower than Visit which I will explain below.

For this example, let's pretend we have a Visit expiry (I am going to use eVar0 to avoid potential naming confusion)

• User clicks on Marketing Email link
• Page A (?cid=x)
  • eVar0 set to "x"
  • eVar0 instance triggered
• Page B
  • eVar0 persists value "x" (due to visit level expiry)
  • eVar0 instance not triggered
• Page C
  • eVar0 persists value "x" (due to visit level expiry)
  • eVar0 instance not triggered
• Order (Action)
  • Purchase event triggered
  • eVar0 persists value "x" (due to visit level expiry)
  • eVar0 instance not triggered
• Second Marketing Email (during the same visit)
• Page D
  • eVar0 set to "y"
  • eVar0 instance triggered
• Page E
  • eVar0 persists value "y" (due to visit level expiry)
  • eVar0 instance not triggered
• Order (Action)
  • Purchase event triggered
  • eVar0 persists value "y" (due to visit level expiry)
  • eVar0 instance not triggered

In your current set up, you will see the values against Page A only.. you won't see the persistence through the visit, or see the association to the order made as a results of the marketing email... Now, you can apply custom attribution to the Order to see the last touch campaign was "x", but you cannot apply custom attribution onto the Page View metric.. so to get the page you would need to create a visit level segment.. but even this gets messy with multiple campaigns in a visit...

In my scenario though, I have everything I need without having to create fancy logic.

The Campaign Instance will apply only to Page A (with the value x) and Page D (with the value y)... these are the "direct links". I can pair the Campaign Dimension with the Instance to get the number of direct links, or with Page Views to get all the pages during that visit associated to the campaign (i.e. for Campaign X that would be Page A, B and C, plus the first order; and for Campaign Y that would be Page D and E and the second order) or with Unique Visitors to get the number of users, etc.

To get an average Pages per Campaign, I can create a calculated metric for PVs/Instances.

Now, it what expiry you set for your Campaigns is up to you... I have both the default 1 week on the tracking code, but because we use UTMs; I set up a conjoined value to pass to the default Tracking Code, but then I also set up individual eVars for the combined value and for each UTM with Visit level attribution.. for our needs, we use the Visit far more often than the 1 week version, but both have their place, and we use the most appropriate dimension for different use cases.

However, even with a single default 1 week setup, you can always use a segment to isolate visits that contain the instance of the eVar, so there are lots of options available.