If you use paid search then you most likely have a number of different campaigns running across a number of different providers. You might use Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, LinkedIn, Facebook, private blogs, etc. With each one of these ad platforms you can login to their respective dashboards and see how many clicks they have sent you and what you've spent. But that requires you to go to a lot of web sites and it doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the visits you're getting.
Wouldn't it be better to login to one dashboard and see all the visits from each source along with an indicator of the visit quality? Of course it would, so let's see how you can do that with ClickDimensions and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Goals
- Learn how to create a custom view in CRM to track online ad activity
URL Parameters
To start, we need some background. When you place an online ad you have the opportunity to specify the URL that the visitor will be directed to when he/she clicks on the ad. LinkedIn refers to this as the Go to URL while other platforms call it the Destination URL. You can make this URL unique by adding a parameter to the end of it. Then it will be easy to locate visits from that ad inside Microsoft CRM if you are using ClickDimensions. Here's an example:
For the LinkedIn ad below I want the visitor to be directed to our home page at http://www.clickdimensions.com/. However, I also want to know that the visitor came from that LinkedIn ad so, to make the URL identifiable, I add the text ?s=linkedinad5 to the end of it.
Here is how the ?s=linkedinad5 part works:
? – This indicates that a parameter will be next.
s – This is the name of the parameter. I can write out the word 'source', or any other word, but all you need is something short.
linkedinad5 - This is the parameter value. It is the part that tells you that this is one of your LinkedIn ads.
Creating a Custom View
Every time someone clicks on this ad the ClickDimensions visit record created inside your Microsoft CRM will show this URL in the entry page field:
With this information it is easy for you to create a CRM view to show all visits from LinkedIn ads:
