Understanding campaign performance

The Tracking section on a campaign shows a card for every form and page you are measuring. This article explains what those cards are telling you.

If you set a UTM source, its logo appears on the card, so you can tell channels apart when you are tracking the same form several times.

A card's status is about pace, not about totals. Contensis works out roughly where you ought to be by this point in the campaign, then compares your actual count to that.

So a card can read Behind on day two of a month-long campaign with a perfectly healthy count, only because there is a lot of month left. And it can read Ahead with a small count if the campaign has barely started. The status answers whether this will reach its target at the current rate, not whether the number is good.

Colour is never the only signal. The status is always written out, so it is readable without relying on being able to distinguish red from green.

Cards are ordered by status, worst first: Behind, then On track, then Ahead. Whatever needs attention rises to the top of the section, so a campaign with a problem shows it without you hunting.

This is the thing about campaigns most likely to catch you out, so it is worth understanding properly.

Campaign figures are worked out from the form responses that exist right now. They are not a running total, and they are not a snapshot taken while the campaign was live. Every time you open a campaign, the numbers are recalculated from what is currently in the system.

That means anything which removes a response also removes it from the campaign's figures:

• Someone deleting a response by hand
• Someone permanently deleting a response
• A form's automatic deletion schedule removing responses once they reach a certain age

None of these leaves a trace on the campaign. The count reads lower than it did.

It applies to finished campaigns exactly as it does to running ones. A campaign that ended in March, reporting 400 responses at the time, can read 380 when you open it in June because 20 responses have since aged out. Nothing has gone wrong, and Contensis cannot show you the earlier figure.

If you need a permanent record of how a campaign performed, take it while the campaign is live or shortly after it ends. Export the responses, or write the figures down. This matters most for forms with a short automatic deletion window, where a campaign's reported performance will visibly decay over the following months.

Archived responses are still counted. Archiving takes a response out of your working list without removing it, and campaign figures include it exactly as before.

So if you are tidying up a form's responses and the campaign's figures matter, archive rather than delete. It is the difference between putting something away and throwing it out, and only one of them changes the numbers.

This is worth knowing before anyone sets up automatic deletion on a form that campaigns depend on, because that schedule deletes rather than archives.

For a fuller picture of any card, including where its traffic came from, select View details. See View tracking performance details.