Saint Codes

[KalaKoch]

Hi! I work at a digital agency, and have a client who uses Saint Codes. They want us to generate them for them to help them track performance on their campaign. Does anyone have experience with these? I'm very familiar with the Google UTM codes and how they work in Google Analytics. But not familiar with Adobe Analytics enough to know how these work. Can anyone help please? Thank you!

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

WOW, they haven't been called SAINT for a while now (shades of my company where half the people still call it Omniture).

So there are a lot of ways to start going about this... first off you need to start looking at the campaign taxonomy. Are you using UTM (so that these can be read by Adobe and Google), are you using Adobe's cid (you will need to understand the formatting of the values to properly support these), are you using a mix of both UTM and cid (since Google Ads by default uses UTMs and not all companies customize this, etc).

I was part of a recent series in Campaign tracking, this might be a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmyLZL5BUf8ECQzyVwwMnwqrt75CP5I57

I would be happy to help you with specifics once you have are feeling more comfortable in the general space.

[KalaKoch]

Hi! We are using Adobe only (no UTMs). Is the only way to create the creative tracking codes is to build them out within Adobe? Or can we use any key code or does that need to be generated out of AA? I have a spreadsheet template that they used last time with another vendor. It has a key column in the sheet, so I'm thinking we just need to update all the other columns to match with our creative names, etc. but not sure how the key is generated?

Are there any good rules of thumb to follow? Thank you so much for your help!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You shouldn't need to create tracking codes in Adobe, rather those codes should be following a standardized format.

So think of UTMs for a second, you have UTM Source - which serves a specific need of the source, or UTM Campaign - which is the unique campaign code so you can tell your various campaigns apart.

CID is very similar, except that all of the items are passed in a single string, in a specific order, with a specific delimiter. This format (or taxonomy) is the key to how this will work. 

If this is coming from a previous vendor, there is likely already rules and formatting concepts in place.

This is an example (but not necessarily what is being used):

facebook:social:october-2022-sale

or

facebook_social_october-2022-sale

The delimiter can be : or _ or anything that you want... and the order of the items in this case is source:medium:campaign - but the important thing is that the use is consistent and that the order is set up properly - since you will be using Regex to parse this into it's individual parts.

Here is a good article: https://analyticsdemystified.com/adobe-analytics/using-utm-campaign-parameters-adobe-analytics/

This is why the first thing I asked about was if you had a taxonomy - since you are taking over an existing implementation... most of the processing rules should already be in place, for an existing defined CID format.

I don't know what the "key" is that you mentioned.... 

[yuhuisg]

You don't create key codes. Rather, those are the values that have been tracked to AA already.

[KalaKoch]

Ahh makes sense. Thank you! So if the client wants a unique tracking code in place for each ad creative – do we just add a number to the end?

For example:

Facebook:social:october-2022-sale-01   (FB ad creative 1)

Facebook:social:october-2022-sale-02 (FB ad creative 2)

And once we’ve identified the formatting, do we need to add to Adobe and where do we attached the code when fulfilling? Are we adding to the creative or to the click thru URL – like a UTM code?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You could use sequential indexing like that, but that would mean for your campaign, each ad would have its own campagin... which would make pulling all ads in the campaign more difficult (I mean, you could use "campaign contains" but it's more work, and won't work out of the box if you want to use your campaigns as a breakdown in your freeform tables....)

If you want to track individual ads, using the sample above, I would actually use a new section delimiter like so:

Facebook:social:october-2022-sale:01   (FB ad creative 1)

Facebook:social:october-2022-sale:02 (FB ad creative 2)

Or better yet, if you are using a management tool for booking/managing ads, I might even use the actual unique ad identifier so that you could easily correlate back to your ad system:

Facebook:social:october-2022-sale:3455346   (FB ad creative 1)

Facebook:social:october-2022-sale:4543656   (FB ad creative 2)

^ something like this would be easier to ensure that no one reuses the same ad ID... 01, 02, etc are just an incremental index (as in two people booking ads simultaneously could both think they are on 03, so now the ads are not uniquely identified...) but if there is a proper unique ad inventory system with generate numbers, using those should prevent accidental merges.

If there is additional context needed, again, you can add as many delimited sections as you deem needed... but again, you need to understand the current setup so that you don't break historical data.

Again, without knowing the organizational infrastructure, it's hard for me to give specific advice, but hopefully this is starting to get you thinking about possibilities.

[yuhuisg]

Did your client provide any documentation on their campaign tracking? Unlike GA, AA doesn't prescribe any fixed campaign parameters, so it's really up to each organisation to define their own. So you shouldn't take our advice at point blank about how the values should be formatted.

I suggest that you speak with your client to get all of their campaign tracking documentation. It looks like they use a form of concatenation of source, medium, creative name, ... something else? ... to form one single campaign tracking code. Then they use SAINT/Classification to split that single tracking code into its components.

[MattCoen]

(Saint) Classifications are used to apply metadata to values within a report. Campaign tracking codes (passed into the s.campaign variable) are similar to UTM codes with the exception that in Adobe Analytics you use a single code rather than multiple codes.

You can set up your own format for the campaign code (i.e. channel_campaignname_etc). Once you set up the format and have data, you can use classifications to report on the components of the campaign code. You can also set up Classification Processing Rules based on the format that will allow you apply classifications to the campaign code dynamically. 

One additional trick is having a developer concatenate any UTM codes you are getting (from Adwords, etc.) and passing the single value into s.campaign.  

[yuhuisg]

If you're familiar with Google Analytics' Data Import feature, then SAINT, or Classifications, as they're known now, works on a similar basis.

Take a look at these Adobe help pages to learn more about Classifications:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/classifications/c-classifications.html?... -- the video here is a good introduction to this feature.

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/classifications/classifications-importe...