Understanding Campaigns

Campaigns help you track and measure your marketing efforts across different channels. Before you create a campaign, review this page to understand the following components of Campaigns:

Shareable links, which let you track campaign traffic using links and QR codes that automatically attribute visitors to your campaign.
Auto-match rules, which automatically track and assign traffic to your campaign based on specific parameters.
Campaign activities, which are existing marketing efforts that you can link to a campaign, such as newsletters and social ads.
Campaigns metrics and reporting, which help you monitor your campaign's performance through key metrics such as sales, orders, and sessions.

Shareable links

All traffic that results from a shareable link is automatically attributed to the campaign that it's from. When creating a link, you can track the presence of each parameter. You can use all supported parameters to make a link as specific as possible.

Shareable links help you track many different types of marketing. You can use your shareable links throughout any of your business's marketing efforts, such as influencer marketing, product launches, radio ads, or other promotions. Each campaign can have multiple shareable links.

When you create a campaign, a default shareable link is generated. You can use the default shareable link, edit the link, or add more shareable links to your campaign for different uses. For example, if you promote your store through influencer marketing, then you can create a shareable link with custom UTM parameters for each individual influencer that you work with.

Shareable link types

Campaigns supports the following shareable link types:

Full URL: This is the full URL for your campaign that contains your unique tracking ID, which you can use in ad managers when you set up an ad for your campaign. Full URLs aren't public facing links.
Short links and QR codes: Short links and QR codes are public facing and can be used in your promotions or shared with customers online or offline.

Interactions with your short links and QR codes are tracked back to your campaign.

Editing a shareable link

Editing a shareable link after customers have engaged with it can impact the results that display in your campaign reports. Additionally, if you change a short link handle, then future customer visits to the previous link will lead to an error page.

To preserve the traffic data linked to an existing link, it's recommended that you instead add a new shareable link for that campaign.

Deleting a shareable link

If you delete a shareable link from a campaign, then all traffic associated with that link is removed from the campaign report. Future customer visits to the deleted link will lead to an error page.

Auto-match rules

You can set up auto-match rules to automatically track and assign specific parameters to your campaigns. When someone interacts with a link, Campaigns matches that session with the parameters that you defined in the auto-match rule. For example:

You create a campaign, and specify the utm_campaign=elle and utm_source=facebook parameters.
A session comes in from HTTP referrer Facebook, with the query parameters ?utm_campaign=elle&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=ad_id&utm_term=sale.
This session is auto-matched, because the rule applied is (utm_campaign = "elle" AND utm_source = "facebook").
All additional parameters from the landing page are ignored.

Supported parameters

When you create an auto-match rule, you can specify any combination of the following standard UTMs and parameters:

utm_campaign: Identifies the name of the specific campaign associated with a URL. For example, utm_campaign=BFCM
utm_source: Identifies the source of your traffic, such as a social media platform or newsletter. For example, utm_source=facebook.
utm_medium: Identifies the channel that your link was clicked from, such as email or social channels. For example, utm_medium=email
utm_term: Tracks the paid keywords associated with a campaign, such as best_running_shoes and cheap_flight_deals.
utm_content: Differentiates the creative elements within the same campaign. For example, if you have two banners on the same webpage, then you can use unique utm_content values to identify which banner performs better, such as red_banner_v1 and blue_banner_v2.
Channel: Identifies the name of the marketing channel that generates the traffic, such as Google or Instagram.
Type: Identifies the traffic type, such as paid or organic.

Editing an auto-match rule

If you edit the parameters of an existing auto-match rule, then your campaign report changes to include any traffic with the new parameters.

Deleting an auto-match rule

If you delete an auto-match rule, then any traffic associated with its parameters is removed from the campaign report.

Campaign activities

Campaign activities are existing traffic that you can manually associate with a campaign, such as a newsletter created using Shopify Email, or an ad on a social media platform. These are a quick way to identify traffic from expected channels without the need to create an auto-match rule. For example, if you've created a Shopify Email campaign to promote a product launch, then you can link it to your campaign as a campaign activity as soon as it generates traffic to your online store.

When you create a campaign, you can take the following actions in the Campaign activities section:

Browse the most recent observed traffic.
Filter campaign activities by channel, UTM medium, and traffic type.
Search by channel, utm_campaign, utm_source, or utm_medium.

Removing a campaign activity

If you remove a campaign activity from your campaign, then all traffic associated with that campaign activity is also removed from the campaign report.