Part One: Understanding Digital Ad Tracking
By Mitch Briggs
This is part-one in a series defining marketing attribution and the benefits it can offer your RV and boat storage business.
Digital marketing can often feel like a guessing game for storage operators. Does it work? Is it worth it? Are my Google PPC ads targeting the right people? Should I be advertising on social media like Facebook or TikTok? Which efforts truly drive results?
If you’re paying for each click it makes sense to ask, “which of those clicks are turning into customers?” The good news is, modern digital marketing tools have made it possible to bring clarity to this process, but there’s a lot to it.
This challenge is often referred to as “Marketing Attribution”—the practice of tracking and analyzing which advertising efforts lead to measurable outcomes—has become an essential strategy for operators looking to maximize their return on advertising investment, and not waste money on campaigns and clicks that don’t lead to leases.
To truly establish marketing attribution from clicks to customers, you’ll need to ensure alignment across three essential different components: your ad platforms, your website, and your facility management software (FMS).
So this is part one of a three-part series that will break down the key components of marketing attribution. We’ll begin with the ad platforms, the critical first step in a customer’s journey, and explore how to track and optimize them to build a solid start to attribution success.
Digital Ads: The Gateway to Your Customers
Advertising platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are where most potential customers first encounter your facility. They play a pivotal role in generating interest and capturing demand to bring traffic to your website.
For the storage industry, these platforms are particularly valuable because they allow operators to target customers at key decision-making moments. For example:
- Google Ads: Potential tenants searching for “RV storage facilities” or “climate-controlled storage in [city]” can be reached with tailored pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
- Facebook and Instagram: These platforms allow for hyper-targeted ads based on demographics, interests, and behaviors, helping you reach customers who may not yet realize they need your services.
- YouTube and Spotify: Video and audio ads provide opportunities to build brand awareness among local audiences.
- Display Retargeting: Ever feel like an ad is following you around when you visit other sites? With the right set up, you can target people who visited your site, but didn’t become a customer, to stay top of mind with visual banner ads while they visit other sites.
However, launching campaigns on these platforms is just the beginning. To truly understand which ads are working, you need to make sure you’ve set up the proper tracking.
Using UTM Parameters
A critical step in marketing attribution is tracking where your traffic comes from. This can be done using UTM parameters—small pieces of text added to the end of your ad URLs. These parameters allow you to identify the source that generated the click.
This is important because the words you use here will be what’s “captured” by your website and analytics tools as the source of traffic. If you call it GooglePPC – that is what will show up in your FMS once that visitor submits a form to lease. You set these values be whatever you like, just be sure to create them in a way that will make sense for understanding where they came from.
Don’t just set the UTM to be “google” or “facebook” because that won’t help you differentiate between what is paid vs. organic.
For example:
- Google PPC Ad URL: https://www.mystorage.com?utm_source=Google-PPC
- Facebook Ad URL: https://www.mystorage.com?utm_source=Paid-Facebook
Each URL is unique, and when a customer clicks on one, your analytics tools capture the UTM information, linking that traffic to the specific ad. There are other UTM parameters called “medium” “campaign” “content” and “term”, so you can utilize all of those once you get more advanced. This allows for combinations that help you get even more granular.
Here is a good example of a more advanced version:
- Instagram Ad URL: https://www.mystorage.com?utm_source=Instagram&utm_medium=Paid-Social&utm_campaign=Move-in-special-2024&utm_content=boxes-ad
This would allow you to know the specific ad campaign and ad creative as well as the combination of source and medium. Medium is typically used for the higher level and more general “type” for the traffic, while source is more specific to the site or service. “Paid Social” as a medium can act as an umbrella for specific “sources” like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, etc.
What are these UTM Parameters for?
To make the most of UTM tracking, you’ll need to be sure you have something on your website that is “listening” to this information you’re sending its way. For most sites, this means Google Analytics 4 (GA4). GA4 allows you to track how visitors from each platform interact with your website, providing insights such as:
This integration bridges the gap between ad clicks and on-site behavior, allowing you to see the full customer journey. We’ll cover this in more detail in the next part of this article series!
Challenges in Tracking and Attribution of Ads
While UTM parameters and analytics tools are powerful, they aren’t foolproof. Some challenges you may face include:
- Lost Tracking: If a user copies and pastes a URL or switches devices, tracking data may be lost.
- Offline Conversions: For customers who see an ad but visit your facility in person, attribution becomes trickier.
- Multiple visits: If a user clicks a Google ad first, doesn’t lease, then 10 days later clicks a Facebook ad and does convert – which click gets the credit? We typically view the “first touch” (in this case, the Google ad) as the one to get the credit
- Ad Blockers and Privacy Settings: Depending on a user’s settings and browser type, it’s not possible to be 100% accurate even with the perfect set up. Don’t let perfect get in the way of good!
Even with these limitations, setting up tracking for your digital ads provides invaluable insights that outweigh the occasional gaps in data.
Creating ads and UTM tracking parameters are just the first touchpoint in the customer journey but a critical component of marketing attribution. By using UTM parameters and integrating your platforms with analytics, you can gain a clear picture of which campaigns are driving traffic and engagement, but you’ll need to go a few steps further to truly see where specific customers came from and be able to calculate return on investment for those ads.
The next step in the attribution process is understanding how your website captures and passes this data into your FMS/PMS—a topic we’ll explore in the next article.
As CMO of Adverank, Mitch Briggs expertly manages unique marketing strategies and ensures everything runs smoothly for customers and the company. Over 350 self-storage locations use Adverank to power their digital ads campaigns. By using real-time occupancy and ad performance data, Adverank acts like a digital ad assistant, sending daily tips to optimize ad spend to achieve the occupancy goals of each location. Adjust Google Ad budgets up or down, or launch full social media ad campaigns with amazing designs, all with just a click!
No more wondering if you’re spending enough or too much to drive occupancy. No need to contact agency reps or wait for the next review meeting to make ad campaign changes. Monthly fees are set and we don’t charge based on commissions, incentivizing self-storage locations to spend exactly what is needed to drive occupancy. Learn more at www.adverank.ai.
