11. Category Set Up

Categories Have Three Main Functions

• To roll up campaign reporting into larger reporting buckets.
• To provide better campaign tracking team management.
• Allow admins to limit member access to only a single or select group of categories.

Grouping Campaigns by Type

• We recommend splitting your campaigns by Campaign Type – acquisition, lead-gen, conversion, and retention. This way you can group your campaigns into great reporting buckets following your user journeys.
• If you want to separate Social type campaigns from Affiliate type campaigns, or Demand Generation campaigns from PR campaigns, you can create distinct categories for each group. 
• Every time you create a campaign, you can attribute it to the right category for better campaign management and reporting.

• If you start using Categories consistently and you want to roll up your campaign reports by category, we recommend that:
  • You set up a custom Category dimension in Google Analytics, using GTM
  • Go to Settings>Campaign Categories and use the right-hand side of the page to activate the option to add a category tag to each link
  • Start adding a category to every link you track and track your category reports in our Reports section.
• Learn more about Custom Dimensions and how they work with CampaignTrackly here.

Grouping Campaigns For Operational Excellence

Better team management and access control is very effective using categories if you have 3+ users in your account and you are using a regular vs enterprise account.

Category assignment and access control ensures people do not step on each other’s toes and they are in control of their individual environments.

• If your team members are responsible for different campaign categories, you can assign each member to access and create campaigns only within their respective category environment to simplify their experience.
• For example, if team member 1 covers all campaign tracking for your APAC region, while team member 2 manages all EMEA campaign links, you can do the following:
  • Team member 1 can be empowered to access and create campaigns only in Category “APAC”
  • Team member 2 can be empowered to view and create campaigns only in Category “EMEA”.

How to Set up a Category Dimension in Google Analytics

• Ask your GA admin to create the custom dimension for you. For example, call it Campaign Category. Here is a quick blog they can follow.
• Make sure that you ask them to share with you the index number of the dimension once it is ready (it’s just a number between 1-20). It will look like this: ga:dimension13, for example. The index is #13.
• Your admin needs to make sure that the dimension is connected to “utm_category” – the tag that will add the extra data to your reports.
• Once everything is set – just head over to Settings>Campaign Categories and use the right-hand side of the page to activate your index.
• Every time you define a category for your link or multi-link campaign, our app will automatically add your “utm_category=the-actual-name-of-your-category” at the end of your link, so that all this extra goodness can be read and identified by GA and you can start receiving extra intelligence for your campaigns.
• Once that starts working, you can go to >External Campaigns Reports and view your stats by Category with a simple click of your mouse!

How to Add a Category to Your Link

• When you are tagging, using both the single- and multiple-link dashboards, you will see a drop-down available, which lets you select a category from your existing categories
• You cannot create categories while you tag. Creating your categories precedes tagging.

Where to See Reports by Category in CampaignTrackly

Once you have setup your category’s custom dimension in GTM and have successfully built links that include the category as a tracking tag, you are ready to see your insights. Head over to our UTM Campaign Reports page to be able to select the category of your interest that you want to review.

How to Limit Member Access by Category

If you are using a Team plan with CampaignTrackly, simply go to Account Settings>Manage Team and click on the permissions icon next to the name of your team member to open their access management page.

There, simply select a category and assign your team member’s permissions within that category.

This concludes our Categories Tutorial. Please move on to the next tutorial to continue your onboarding.