Using Custom Properties to Collect Marketing Campaign Details
Using Custom Properties to Collect Marketing Campaign Details
When using the Usage Intelligence SDK in your application, you can collect information related to your download sources and marketing campaigns in the form of Custom Properties. The information you collect can be used in report filtering and segmentation, as well as ReachOut™ filters and variables. This will help you to:
Measure the effectiveness and ROI of your marketing campaigns.
Perform conversion and churn analysis for specific campaigns.
Compare churn and feature usage for users who come from a particular campaign.
The way you collect marketing campaign details will depend on how you distribute your application installer and the kind of campaigns that you make use of. Below are some ideas to get you started:
The easiest option is to generate a different build and/or landing page for each campaign or referral download site that you want to track. Each build will contain a specific campaign ID embedded in it (such as inside a configuration file or separate text file). This Campaign ID is read from this file after installation and passed as a Custom Property.
Another option is to change the installer filename based on the download source, so instead of your users downloading MyApp-Setup.exe they would download MyApp-Setup-G123.exe, where G123 would refer to a campaign ID that you want to track. The installer can read the filename and save this value in a configuration file which is then passed as a Custom Property. If you choose to go for this option, remember that the user can rename the file or the file might be saved with a different name if the download location already contains a file with the same name, so your application must cater for this.
Alternatively you can distribute your installer as part of an archive which would also contain a file with the campaign details of where the archive was downloaded from, such as the campaign ID and/or name. The installer can copy this file with the rest of the application files and once the application is run it can pass the campaign details from this file as Custom Properties.
How Can I Use the Campaign Details I Collect?
Reporting
The marketing campaign ID or other details you collect in Custom Properties can be used in reports to filter and segment data by a specific campaign and connect your web analytics with your Usage Intelligence statistics. This will help you gauge how effective your marketing campaigns are and determine out of the number of users that downloaded the installer how many of them actually went through with the installation, how long they used the product for, and which events they generated. You can also use filters or segmentation by campaign or download source in order to run specific Churn analysis reports to determine Churn rates and usage patterns for each source.
ReachOut™ In-App Messaging and Marketing
The data you collect in Custom Properties can be used in ReachOut™ campaigns to filter your user base and can also be combined with other filtering properties, such as targeting users that came from particular campaign(s) and that have used the product for a specific number of days or less.
Additionally, custom properties can be used in the content of ReachOut™ messages. This can be useful when you went to send your customers a URL which takes them to a landing page or shopping cart, and which includes the marketing campaign ID as a URL parameter.
