Marin Dimensions and the Importance of Proper Tagging | Elite SEM
Implementation
- ADMIN
- Dimensions
- [+Create]
- “Dimension:” is what you want to name the dimension
- “Description:” allows you to attach a brief description of the purpose of the dimension
- Advanced Settings- “Mode:” “tagging” allows you to tag a dimension, “tagging and rollup” allows you to see reporting
Basic Usage of Custom Value in Marin
At the most basic level, a dimension is a custom value you can set for any channel, campaign, group, keyword, or creative. The most detailed level will always take precedence (i.e., if you set a dimension value at both the campaign and keyword level, the keyword level value will supersede the campaign value). The simplest way I’ve found to explain this is through a dimension I always create first called “Product Type.” For this dimension, I simply tag every campaign as what product it corresponds to- for example, if I was an ecommerce client selling electronics, I would have all of my TV campaigns tagged as “TV” and all of my computer campaigns tagged as “Computer.” This lets you roll up performance by product regardless of keyword match type, ad group granularity, etc. Now, suppose you have a subset of keywords for “Color TVs” that you want to monitor performance separately. If you tag those at the ad group level, those keywords would show up as “Color TV” in the dimension and all other keywords in the campaign would still show up as “TV.”
Intermediate Steps
Other things that are commonly tagged through dimensions include geographic target, match type, or keyword “types” (brand terms, competitor terms, non-brand). For example, if you have some campaigns that are nationally targeted, then a group of campaigns that are targeting a specific geo location (say, San Francisco), you can tag the former as “National” and the latter as “San Francisco” and then measure the difference in performance between those geo settings directly in Marin. For match type, Marin lacks the native ability to differentiate performance between a broad match and a broad-modified keyword. You can tag your keywords as “Broad”, “BMM”, “Phrase”, etc. to create your own custom level of reporting that includes that level of detail.
Advanced Cases
- You can actually build dimensions into your URL builder settings. For example, when using Mongoose integrations (for phone call tracking), your URLs will need to include a custom Mongoose campaign code through the mm_campaign variable. If you build a custom dimension called “Mongoose_Code”, you can simply insert a “&mm_campaign=[mongoose_code]” variable into your URL builder settings and the URL will automatically populate the Mongoose code.
- Ad copy testing– if you want to keep track of ad copy tests you are running, you can create a custom dimension for that and tag your ad copy as you load them in. For example, you want to test the efficacy of a new promotional offer. Tag your original ad copy as “Promo Offer- CONTROL” and your new ad copy as “Promo Offer- EXPERIMENTAL” and you will have easy access to high-level stats during the duration of your test. I find this more useful than the standard Marin A|B testing as this lets you view top-level performance, rather than per-ad group performance (thus letting you work with a much larger data set).
- Keyword bid testing– one thing I was testing extensively for one of my clients was using rank targets for a small subset of my non-brand keywords. To track this, I used my existing “Product Type” dimension but tagged the rank targeted keywords as “Product – Rank Target”. That let me not only track their performance separately, but I could filter specifically for them and manipulate them quickly and efficiently.
- Landing page testing– getting accurate landing page test data can be difficult, especially if you’re managing multiple domains within individual campaigns and dealing with different vendors (AdWords, BingAds, GDN, etc.). Bypass all of this with a custom dimension, using Display URL filters to tag the dimension to the correct landing page (this ensures you include BingAds and GDN data, as the former will have {param1} creative URLs and the latter will not have keyword URLs at all).
- Reporting– all of Marin’s reporting functions allow you to report via dimension (web query, pdf, excel). You can provide all of the above data in easily accessible reports for your clients!
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