Acquisition

User Acquisition data answers questions that, for online business, are as important as understanding where users come from to allocate resources effectively.

Yet, different tools like Google and Meta process their data according to their own criteria, making their attribution increasingly less reliable.

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That is why the acquisition section, found at the bottom left of your sidebar, gathers this information directly from your frontends, allowing you to see first-click and last-click attribution for every event directly from your real users and their sessions in real time.

These tracks are independent of the hits recorded by other Analytics and Marketing platforms, something that allows us to provide you with an unbiased, platform-agnostic view of your acquisition data. This ensures you see a pure, unaltered view of the data directly from the source to help you accurately identify the channels that drive the most valuable traffic to your website.

Key Components in Trackingplan’s Acquisition Dashboards

With support for UTM campaigns, mediums, sources, referrers, landings, and pages, Trackingplan’s acquisition dashboards allow for detailed insights. Using campaigns as an example, here’s what you can see in this section:

Data Segmentation

At the top of the acquisition view, you’ll be able to segment your campaigns, helping you differentiate between active and offline campaigns.

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Moreover, for all your acquisition data, you’ll be able to select traffic by date, allowing you to analyze specific time periods or investigate anomalies within a precise timeframe. This will also allow you to refresh your data every 5 minutes when selecting the Option “Today”, being especially useful for real-time monitoring and staying aligned with the most recent data available at that moment.

Performance Metrics

In the Performance Metrics section, you’ll find essential data points to assess the effectiveness of each acquisition source:

Status: This shows you when new acquisition data is discovered and automatically tells you if they’re OK or if there are issues you need to address (New, OK, Warn, Offline).
Daily, weekly, and monthly hits: The number of new users for every acquisition source, with detailed daily, weekly, and monthly statistics about the performance of your marketing investments.

Edit View and Custom Attribution Models

By clicking on edit view, you’ll be able to customize your acquisition setup according to your preferences. To do this, just click on the “Edit View” button located at the top-right corner of your dashboard.

Event Customization: Choose any event you want to compare from your providers. To do this, simply drag and drop the events you’d like to track, deleting and rearranging them to your preferences.

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As you can see in the example, this allows you to compare any of your events across each of your destinations, helping you identify performance differences as we see in the generated view below. For more use cases, click here.

Comparison Options: Additionally, it is in this modal where you’ll be able to select different models to compare your data.

Compare to users or sessions: This option is ideal if you want to see the percentage of users or sessions that have completed the events you’ve specified you want to track.
Compare to previous event: This option is ideal if you want to see the percentage of hits compared to the previous event.

Attribution Models: Finally, to complete editing this view, choose between different First-Click and Last-Click attribution models:

First Click: Gives full credit to the first time the user visited your site, helping you assess the importance of top-funnel activities, like awareness-driven campaigns.
Last Click: Assigns credit to the last session before the event happened. This is useful for direct response campaigns focusing on the last action before conversion.

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To enjoy the full functionality of the last-click attribution model, please ensure your Web SDK is updated to the latest version. If you need assistance, feel free to contact us for more information and support.

After customizing your view according to your preferences, Trackingplan offers the option to save it as a preset, making it accessible to the rest of your team members.

Additional Tools within Trackingplan’s Acquisition Dashboards

But that’s not all! Trackingplan offers a suite of powerful tools designed to enhance the monitoring and analysis capabilities within your Acquisition Dashboards.

Data Explorer: View all events triggered in a specific campaign, useful for monitoring activity and ensuring pixel implementation is correct. Learn more about Trackingplan’s Data Explorer.
Mark as favorite: Track high-priority campaigns closely by adding them to your Starred Items for focused monitoring and notifications in your digests. This will also rearrange those marked as favorites to the top positions within your view.

Additionally, by clicking on the three dots, you’ll be able to access each of these functionalities. Let’s review them in more detail:

View Notes: Add notes for sharing context and observations to facilitate collaboration among your team.
Filter by Source or Medium: Filter data by specific sources or mediums to focus on performance within a particular channel.
Warning Settings: This is where you can configure traffic warnings for your campaigns and acquisition data, allowing you to receive alerts for traffic peaks or drops.
Hide Campaign: Hide specific campaigns from your view.
View Events: Answer which specific events can be found in your campaigns.
Tracks Explorer: See real-time session tracks for each of your campaigns.

Use Cases

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Functionalities are great, but understanding how to leverage them effectively is where the real value lies. That’s why in this section, we’ll explore a variety of use cases that demonstrate the practical applications of Trackingplan’s Acquisition Dashboards. Whether you’re looking to enhance your campaign performance, improve data quality and attribution, or streamline collaboration among your team, let’s dive into the exciting possibilities that await you!

Compare Events Across Providers

As illustrated before, Trackingplan allows you to compare the same event across multiple providers. This functionality helps you identify discrepancies and evaluate the performance of each provider in your MarTech stack, allowing you to make informed decisions about where to allocate resources.

Create funnels

With Trackingplan, you can easily set up funnels by organizing your events in a sequential order. For instance, to analyze the performance of your campaigns, you could edit your view starting with the page view event, followed by the view item, the add to cart, and the checkout event. This gives you a comprehensive overview of the entire funnel at a glance, enabling you to pinpoint where users are dropping off in the purchase process.

Deep Dive into Campaign Performance

The Data Explorer feature allows you to analyze the performance of specific campaigns in detail by filtering your events based on the properties or data layer tags you have set up.

For example, you can segment your data by currency to see which one is generating the most purchases or tailor your insights further by filtering for specific user demographics to optimize your marketing efforts for targeted markets.

You can also tailor your insights further by filtering your purchases by certain product categories.

Real-Time Insights for Campaign Launches

Another valuable use case is for monitoring newly launched campaigns. For example, if you launch a campaign on a Friday, you can instantly check data from that same day to ensure all events are firing correctly. If you notice any issues, you can make adjustments promptly before it’s too late.

This capability is particularly crucial during high-stakes periods, like Black Friday. If something goes awry on the day of the launch, you won’t be able to make changes until after the weekend. However, with real-time insights, you can verify that everything is functioning as expected so you won’t have to face them with your first coffee the next Monday morning.

Exploration and Pixel Validation

The insights generated from Trackingplan’s Acquisition Dashboards can also be extremely useful to validate that your pixel implementations are correct. For instance, you can easily check if a specific campaign has dropped off and understand the impact this has on your overall performance, ensuring that your tracking setup is functioning as intended.

User Acquisition Warnings: Gaining Control at your Acquisition Data

Moreover, with Trackingplan, you can also set up customized warnings for all your referrers, campaigns, mediums, sources, landings, and pages to track them with more granularity.

Doing it is as easy as just hovering the cursor over the items you want to track closely and clicking on the “Warning Settings” button to configure them according to your specifications.

Trackingplan will always propose predefined alerts based on your business type, but you can configure them as you prefer to ensure you receive a warning only when the conditions you specify are met. Moreover, you can also set the tolerances at which they trigger, choosing between low, medium, or high tolerance levels. Learn more about Traffic Warning Tolerances here.

UTM Naming Conventions Monitoring

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Trackingplan helps you ensure consistency and accuracy in the naming conventions used across your campaigns, mediums, and sources by detecting and highlighting discrepancies, such as duplicate or improperly formatted names, that may compromise data quality and campaign attribution.

For it, Trackingplan enables you to create customized naming convention rules for your UTMs to seamlessly validate that your campaigns consistently adhere to your established naming standards.

With them, any element—whether it's a campaign name, medium, or source—that breaches the rules will be highlighted, providing you with instant visibility into where corrections are needed.

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Think of it as a “spellchecker” for your campaign data that visually pinpoints which elements are not meeting the required standards.

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For more information about how to create or leverage our pre-configured rules, refer to our Naming Conventions Monitoring section.

Creating Rules for UTM Naming Conventions

Maintaining proper UTM naming conventions is essential for preventing attribution errors that could disrupt the accuracy of your marketing performance metrics. That’s why having precise and consistent UTM naming conventions is crucial for reliable attribution.

Let’s explore some practical use cases with some real-world examples:

Enforce Numeric Values for the UTM Source affiliate

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Setting up a rule to trigger an alert if the source is set to affiliate, but campaign name contains letters or any other non-numeric values.

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Consistent and valid UTM parameters reduce attribution errors, helping you accurately calculate the return on ad spend (ROAS), and determine the true cost per acquisition (CPA). For more help, our UTM Builder Tool can guide you in creating structured and error-free UTM parameters.

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