Setting up Campaigns

Introduction

Tracking your marketing campaigns is key to understanding how different sources drive traffic to your website and contribute to conversions. Mapp Intelligence provides powerful tools to help you capture, analyze, and optimize these campaigns. Whether it’s email newsletters, Google Ads, or social media, our platform allows you to set up campaigns that measure the effectiveness of your efforts and help you make data-driven decisions.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through setting up your campaigns step by step, explaining both automatic and manual options for configuration. You’ll also learn how to integrate other tools like Google Ads and measure detailed metrics like campaign views and costs. By the end, you’ll be able to track where your website visitors come from and how they interact with your content—all in one place.

1 Campaign Data Sources – How Are Campaigns Tracked?

In Mapp Intelligence, campaigns are tracked using various data sources. These sources identify how visitors accessed your website and which campaign they interacted with. Data sources are essential for recognizing specific campaigns, such as newsletters, ads, or landing pages.

1.1 Types of Data Sources for Campaign Tracking

Mapp Intelligence uses various data sources to track how visitors interact with your campaigns. Here’s a list of data sources used to identify campaigns:

1.2 Primary vs. Secondary Data Sources – Prioritizing Campaign Attribution

When Mapp Intelligence detects multiple data sources (e.g., a URL parameter and a social media referrer), it uses a prioritization system to ensure only one source is tracked. This distinction is important for ensuring the correct campaign is tracked.

Primary Data Sources: These are the most reliable and take priority over others when tracking campaigns. Primary sources include:

• URL Parameters (media codes)

• Landing Pages

• Link

Secondary Data Sources: Used when no primary data source is available, these include:

• SEO

• Social Media Referrers

• Other Sources

• Direct Entries

• TV & Radio

Why Is This Important?

If multiple data sources are detected (e.g., a visitor comes from a social media link and then interacts with a URL parameter), the campaign will be tracked based on the primary data source (in this case, the URL parameter), rather than the secondary data source.

Real-Life Scenario for Marketers:

Let’s say you’re running a summer sale campaign and promoting it via a Facebook ad. The link in the Facebook ad includes a URL parameter to track the campaign (e.g., www.mapp.com?wt_mc=facebook.summer_sale).

• In Mapp Intelligence, you’ve set up tracking for Facebook traffic via the secondary data source of social media referrer, which automatically tracks users coming from Facebook.

• However, because the URL in the Facebook ad contains a primary data source (the URL parameter wt_mc=facebook.summer_sale), Mapp Intelligence will prioritize the URL parameter over the social media referrer.

• As a result, only the summer sale campaign will be tracked, defined by the URL parameter, rather than Facebook traffic being tracked as part of a broader social media referrer.

This ensures that specific campaign tracking based on the URL parameter takes precedence over general referrer-based tracking, providing a more accurate view of the campaign's performance.

1.3 Redirect Tracking – Track External Links Easily

Redirect tracking allows you to track external links that don’t lead to a website tracked with Mapp Intelligence (e.g., a Facebook link in an email signature). This method is useful when you want to capture clicks on external links or measure additional engagement beyond your website.

Redirect tracking is included as part of the Link data source.

Benefits of Redirect Tracking:

• Captures user clicks immediately after they click the link, even before the target page fully loads.

• Tracks external links, even if they don’t lead to a page with a Mapp Intelligence tag.

Redirect tracking should be used with care. Each click generates a visit, which can lead to skewed analysis if the links don’t lead to actual website visits. You can either filter out these campaigns from your analysis or set up a separate Mapp Intelligence account to isolate this data.

Example redirect link

Use the following structure for the redirect link.

In our example, the campaign needs to be configured the following way:

2 Campaign Setup – Automate or Customize?

You can set up campaigns in two ways: automatically or manually.

2.1 Automatic Campaign Setup – Save Time with Automation

Why Automatic Setup? It saves time and ensures consistency. Once you’ve configured Mapp Intelligence to recognize your campaigns, it will automatically track new Ad media based on the rule you define.

The media code can be used to define the structure of the Ad media directly. Different hierarchical campaign categories are separated with a ".".

Example:

Steps for Automatic Setup

1. Create Channel
   Go to Mapp Q3 > Configuration > Marketing Configuration and click "New Channel" on the tab "Automatic Ad Media Tracking".
   

2. Define Channel Setting
   

   • Data Source: Define a data source that uniquely identifies this channel. Use an asterisk (*) as a placeholder.

   • Channel Name: The name that will be visible in the selected category (see below)

   • Active: Automatic tracking is active

   • Channel Priority: In the case of overlapping data sources, you can define different priorities per channel.

     • Example:

       Automatic Channel	Data source	Priority
       Display	wt_mc=display*	5
       Fallback	wt_mc=*	1

       Learn more about how to create a fallback channel in this article.

   • Source: The Traffic source of the channel

   • Hierarchical Category: On which campaign category should the channel be added?

   • Allocation to the hierarchical categories: Show the name of the channel
     

3. Additional Settings for each Ad Media
   Each created Ad Media will have the here defined settings.

   

   • Ad Media Duration: Should data collection be limited?

   • Attributions Settings: Relevant for Customer Journey and Attribution. Learn more about the settings here.

Changes to the configuration of the channels do not have any effect on existing Ad media!

This setup is ideal for managing recurring campaigns across different channels, as it reduces manual work.

2.2 Manual Campaign Setup – Full Control at Your Fingertips

You can set up campaigns manually if you prefer more control or need to configure campaigns that don’t fit the automatic template.

Manual Setup Steps via User Interface

1. Navigate to Mapp Q3 > Start > New Ad Media.

2. Configuration
   Basic settings

   • Data Source: Define a data source that uniquely identifies this campaign.

   • Ad Media: The name that will be shown in the analysis

   Categories settings

   • Source: The Traffic source of the channel

   • Categories: (optional) Select values for non-hierarchical categories

   • Allocation to the hierarchical categories: Select where the Ad Media should be added.

   • Ad Media Duration: Should data collection be limited?
     

   Attributions Settings: Relevant for Customer Journey and Attribution. Learn more about the settings here.

After saving, the newly created Ad Media will appear in the campaign structure (Mapp Q3 > Configuration > Marketing Configuration > Campaign Structure).

The Ad Media does not appear in the campaign analyses until the first campaign click has been recorded.

Manual Setup Steps via Import

Campaigns can be imported via Excel, JSON, or data feeds. This guide shows the Excel import.

1. Export
   Export existing campaigns from Mapp Q3 > Configuration > Marketing Configuration > Import and Export.
   
   You can limit and filter campaigns using the checkboxes to reduce the number of campaigns exported.
   

2. Edit
   Edit the data in Excel.
   
   

   • Mandatory fields are marked with an asterisk (*).

   • Fill in all required attributes for an Ad media in one of the rows. The “Action” column is not necessary for new Ad media entries.

   • Mapp Intelligence can also automatically suggest media codes. To use this feature, select the action “suggest” and leave the data source field empty. After importing, perform another export to retrieve the generated media code.
     

3. Re-Import
   Re-import the file, and Mapp Intelligence will automatically integrate the new data.

Changes will not be visible in Mapp Intelligence until after the next data update (generally every hour).

The status can be viewed under "Show Current Imports". Any errors that may have occurred are also displayed here.

Campaign URL Builder – Generate Media Codes for Your Campaigns

The Campaign URL Builder is a simple tool for creating custom URL parameters (media codes) to track landing page traffic. By generating these codes, you can easily organize your campaigns and analyze performance across different channels. Enter the information you want to see in the campaign tree later. The tool generates a media code that you can use for a campaign.

Use this link to open the Campaign URL Builder

3 Google Ads Integration – Automated Data Import from Google Ads

Mapp Intelligence offers an API that integrates with Google Ads, allowing you to import key performance metrics automatically. This eliminates the need to track your ad campaigns manually, ensuring you have accurate and up-to-date data.

The interface configuration matches the campaign categories with the respective layers of the Google Ads campaign. To fully match the Ads layers, we recommend setting up a campaign tree consisting of at least five levels.

Mapp Q3 > Configuration > Interfaces > Google Adwords

Metrics that can be imported automatically include:

• Clicks

• Impressions

• Costs

• Average Position

• CTR

• Campaign Cost Sales Relation

Extended information can be found in the document Setting Up Google Ads API.

4 Importing campaign costs & other metrics

Mapp Intelligence allows you to track more than just clicks and views. You can import additional metrics for a holistic view of your campaign performance.

Default metrics

The following metrics are available by default:

• Campaign Costs: Costs of an Advertising Media

• Campaign Audience: Size of the target group (e.g., amount of newsletter receivers, Feed or Tweet followers, etc.)

• Campaign Views (imported): Number of campaign views imported from another marketing tool

• Campaign Clicks (imported): Number of measured campaign clicks imported from another marketing tool

The costs of Google Ads campaigns can be automatically imported through the Google Ads connection.

Use these metrics in your campaign analyses.

Custom metrics

If you need additional metrics, you have to create a non-hierarchical campaign category.

4.1 Setting up the import

Preliminary considerations: On which time basis is the imported data available?

• The more detailed the metrics are on hand, the more precise they can be analyzed.

• The upload generally takes place every hour. If the data do not arrive hourly, they can be broken down into single hours or summarized into one hour (e.g., Hour 0).

The import is available through Excel, JSON, and data feed.

Example Excel import

1. First, the mapping table must be exported (Mapp Q3 > Configuration > Marketing Configuration).
   
   

2. Set the category type to "with Time relationship …"
   
   

3. Data can be added to the exported Excel table.
   

   
   The following fields must be filled out for a correct assignment:

   Time	Format YYYY-MM-DD HH
   Data Source Value	E.g., mediacode
   Data Source Type	E.g., mediacode, page, SEO, Social Media Sources…

4. Import the file

   Data will be available after the next account update. The upload status can be viewed through Mapp Q3 > Configuration > Marketing Configuration > Show Current Imports.