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When to Use the Campaign Content Field: HR Email Example

Background

The campaign-tagging “content” field is probably the most misunderstood campaign-tagging field available.

When using campaign-tagging for online advertising – the canonical example – it is fairly clear that you use the content field to distinguish between two ads which have the same medium, source, and campaign, but have different ad content (layout, text, or images).

But even for media other than online advertising – such as emails – the content field can be similarly used to distinguish between content variations (Google uses the content field in their emails to specify the language in which the email was written), or between different topical areas of a message or link.

Human Resources Email Example

The Human Resources department recently sent out an email which provides a perfect example of when you might have cause to use the optional ‘content’ field in email in campaign tagging:

HR email text: “Please note: The new icons on the green headers below? These icons help categorize the announcement’s dimension of well-being! For example, the buildings identify community well-being and the handshake identifies social well-being. You can view a legend of these icons here!”

Campaign-Tagging Schema

Good campaign-tagging requires that you give each link three required fields:

Medium: what is the medium in which the link is found: email;
Source: where was the link posted or who sent it: gmu-hr;
Campaign: what marketing goal does this support: this is up to the department (perhaps “outreach”).

Tagging all of their email links according to this schema would give them data about how many people follow any of these links from the email to their website, but it wouldn’t tell them which topics resulted in the most visits.

But obviously they think of the links that they share as being organized into specific topical groups, and they even took the time to organize their email that way.

If they want to track which topics get the most clicks, they should campaign-tag all of those links to include the topic area in the content field. That way, they can see if particular topics result in more click than others.

If they’re going to go to the trouble to organize these links by topic-area, they should consider tracking the topic-area of each link in the content fields so that they can see which topic areas are of most interest to their readers.