One of the newest features on Multiply, which powers the forms on all of our clients’ websites is the ability to store Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) codes, which allow a website’s owner to track where specific traffic is coming from within tools like Google Analytics.

For example, suppose an Engage client has a petition at example.com and I’m going to run a digital ad campaign to drive traffic to that petition. Rather than pointing all of my paid media to example.com, I want to track the specific traffic back to specific ads, so I use UTM codes, which look like this:

http://www.example.com/?utm_source=DrudgeReport&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=leaderboard&utm_campaign=campaign

Now, each time a supporter visits the client’s site (or a specific landing page), I can know that the traffic came from my ad on DrudgeReport.com, it was a banner ad, the specific ad was a leaderboard, and this was for my example digital advertising campaign. The supporter will still be getting to the page they were advertised, but our client will know a little bit more about them.

Here’s where we at Engage take it to the next level. When the supporter converts and actually signs the petition, we then store that information with their record in the site’s database. What’s the point?

Any organization, whether it’s a political campaign or a major consumer brand, wants to know about the Return on Investment (ROI) of an ad campaign. It’s always easy to figure out the “I”, but the true “R” is harder to get at. Let’s go back to our example.com ad campaign.

Suppose we spend $10,000 to get 2,500 new email addresses. That works out to an investment of $4 per email address with almost no immediate return (immediate being the keyword here). Now, over the course of the next six months, let’s say that 25% of the new email addresses convert to donors with an average contribution of $40 each. That’s 625 donors at $40 a piece for a total of $25,000.

With Multiply’s sophisticated data tracking codes — all based on UTM codes — we now know that the ad campaign led to $25,000 in donations. Alternatively, we could have learned that the new supporters from our example ad campaign only donated $5,000, but the people who clicked on our ad on RedState.com were two times more likely to donate than the people who clicked on our ad at DrudgeReport.com.

Either way, we’ve learned very important information about the return on our investment. And, to quote, G.I. Joe, “Knowing is the half the battle.”