What Do You Want to See?
The reports you need decide which facts your links must record, because nothing can be added to a click after it's made.
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“Which channels actually drive shoe sales?”
The CEO of Stride Footwear asks Dana some version of that every month. Every month her answer starts the same way: “It’s hard to say.”
Most teams’ first instinct is the same: clean it up. Pick facebook, ban fb, fold the four spellings of last spring’s campaign into one. It feels like progress, because the report looks better with every rename.
So let’s do it properly. Assume the cleanup is perfect, then ask the report a question.
Clean the report, then ask it something
Last spring, Stride’s running-shoe ads and lifestyle-shoe ads went out under the same values: the same campaign name, the same landing page, and nothing on the link to tell one ad from another. Here is last spring after the cleanup, every spelling that could be merged now one value:
| Campaign | Source |
|---|---|
spring_sale | facebook |
spring_sale | instagram |
spring_sale | google |
spring_sale | newsletter |
spring_sale | mailchimp |
The mailchimp row survived. Hold that thought.
Now three questions. Before you open the answers, mark each one: answerable now, fixable afterwards, or never.
- How did Facebook do last spring, all four spellings together?
- Suppose last spring had also run a clearance campaign that promoted only lifestyle shoes. Can a report by product line count that campaign’s clicks under lifestyle?
- The CEO’s follow-up: did the runners ads or the lifestyle ads earn their spend?
Show the answersHide the answers
- Fixable afterwards, and already fixed.
FB,fbandFacebookall meant Facebook, so merging them lost nothing. This is the part of the cleanup that works. - Fixable afterwards. No click carries a product line. But the clearance campaign promoted one line, so its campaign value tells you which. A two-column list, campaign on the left and product line on the right, answers it for every click the campaign ever got.
- Never. Last spring’s ads for both lines carried the same values: the same campaign name, the same landing page, and nothing on the link to tell one ad from another. Stride’s purchase records say which shoes sold, but a lifestyle ad can sell a running shoe, so what sold isn’t what each ad promoted. No lookup helps either, because one campaign value covered both lines. The clicks already recorded will never answer this one.
Look at the third one again. Nothing in it is misspelled.
What’s missing is a dimension, not a spelling, and no cleanup in the world reaches it.
You can remap what was recorded, never record what wasn’t
The three answers split for one reason. A report can only group and filter by facts that were recorded with each click. Everything after that is rearranging.
Rearranging gets you surprisingly far. Your analytics never edits a visit once it’s recorded: a click that arrived as FB stays FB for good. What you can change is how a report reads it. You hand the report a short correction list, as a rule in your reporting tool or as a column beside an exported spreadsheet:
| Recorded on the click | Read it as |
|---|---|
FB | facebook |
fb | facebook |
Facebook | facebook |
mailchimp | the newsletter? a promotion? |
That list is a remap, and it’s all Dana’s cleanup ever was. The first three rows work because each spelling meant one thing. The last row is where a remap gives up. Stride’s email tagging had been set to write mailchimp on every send, newsletters and promotions alike, so one spelling hides two meanings, and no entry in the list can be right for both. It’s why the mailchimp row survived.
What rearranging can’t do is invent a fact. If no click carried which product line its ad promoted, no list, report or tool can read it off those clicks later. The ad platform still knows what each ad cost, how often it was clicked and which sales its own tracking credits to each ad, and Chapter 6 puts that to work. But that’s the platform marking its own homework, and only its own. The visits, the leads and the sales in your analytics carry only what the click carried, and that’s where the CEO’s question has to be answered.
The past stays blind.
A lookup is the same two-column list doing a different job. It reads a recorded value and fills in what it implies: a lifestyle-only campaign means lifestyle shoes. Add it to the remap and you have three ways to get a fact into a report, each with a condition attached:
| Way | Works when | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Record it on the link | From the day you start recording it. Never for the clicks before. | This spring, Stride’s campaign value carries runners. |
| Derive it by lookup | It follows from something that was recorded. | A campaign that promoted only lifestyle shoes maps to lifestyle. |
| Answer it once by hand | The question is a one-off, and someone still remembers. | Why did traffic spike one Tuesday? Whoever posted that day remembers. Ask again in a year and nobody will. |
Recording is the only one that works for the questions nobody has asked yet. The fact rides with the click into every report that will ever read it: this quarter’s dashboard, next year’s comparison, the analysis someone dreams up after you’ve left. Its one weakness is time. It only works going forward.
Which fixes the order of the work. Decide what you’ll need to know before the links go out, because a dimension covers clicks from the day it’s recorded, and not one day earlier.
Back to the Introduction’s letter: the channel, the source, the initiative, the product, the launch month. Each of those facts is a dimension. Here we decide what the letter says. How it travels is the next problem.
Work backwards from the report
So the work starts with a wish, not a value. “I wish I could see which campaigns drive sales, by product line.” That one sentence names its dimensions before anyone opens a spreadsheet.
Work backwards from the report, never forwards from the parameters. Go forwards and you end up with a familiar artifact: a sheet of approved values, not one of which traces back to a report anyone asked for.
1The wish
Which campaigns drive sales, by product line?
2Dimensions
channel, source, campaign, product
3Carried on the link
Chapter 2
4Written as values
Chapter 3
Try it on your own analytics. Write down what you wish you could see but can’t. The list usually starts like this:
- There’s a campaign name. Which product was it selling? The name won’t tell you.
- Awareness campaigns and conversion campaigns, graded on the same curve, because nothing records what each one was for.
- When did that campaign even run? Go find the spreadsheet. It’s an ex-colleague’s spreadsheet.
Every line on that list is a dimension you’re not recording. Your reports aren’t bad.
They’re blind, one dimension at a time.
Three dimensions answer most questions
Most of what any team gets asked comes down to three. Channel is the kind of traffic: paid social, email, paid search. Source is the platform or sender inside it: Facebook, Google, the newsletter. Campaign is the initiative: the spring sale, a launch.
Past those three, the menu is yours:
- Product line: which line the marketing promoted, the fact Stride never recorded.
- Placement: which link, creative or display the click came from.
- Region: where the campaign ran, once you sell in more than one place.
- Audience: who it was aimed at, such as new visitors or past buyers.
- Goal: what the campaign was for (awareness, leads or sales), so it’s judged by the right number.
- Date: when it launched, so this spring compares with last. (How to write one so it sorts is Chapter 3’s job.)
None of them comes free. Each is one more choice someone makes correctly on every link, and one more list someone keeps. A field nobody reports on gets filled in carelessly.
And then it lies.
Early or late, you pay
The two costs pull against each other, and where you stand decides which way to lean:
Add it early
You pay on every link, including the ones nobody ever asks about.
Lean this way when leadership asks the same questions every quarter, so you can see them coming.
Add it late
It covers only the clicks from that day on. Everything before stays blind.
Lean this way when the questions shift: keep to the few you’re sure of, and add one when a question comes back a second time.
And the more people make your links, the more every extra field costs.
In Dana’s seat, we’d add product line today. It’s one more choice on every link Stride’s four marketers make, and it pays back the first time the CEO asks last spring’s question about this spring.
What changes
| The decision | Starting from the values | Starting from the report |
|---|---|---|
| What the taxonomy is | a cleanup project | a decision about which questions the coming year of clicks must answer |
| When a missing dimension is found | when the CEO asks, and the past can’t be fixed | on the wish list, before the campaign’s first link ships |
| When a dimension gets added | when someone thinks it might be useful | when a real report needs it, knowing it covers clicks from that day on |
| How a cleanup is judged | by how tidy the report looks | by which questions the report can now answer |
Where the rule lives
Every dimension on Dana’s list becomes a field someone fills in each time they make a link. Its list of allowed values can live in one of two places:
Beside the path
Written in a document, it’s a rule people have to remember on a busy Friday.
Inside the path
Built into the place where links get made, it’s simply how a link gets made.
Which leaves one question. A fact only reaches a report if something writes it onto the click.
What writes it there?
Check yourself
Your CMO wants to know whether webinars or ebooks bring in more qualified leads. Your campaign names look like summer_push and spring_promo, every one spelled correctly. What's missing, and can you answer for last quarter?
Show answerHide answer
An offer-type dimension: nothing in summer_push says webinar or ebook. For last quarter, only a lookup can help, and only if each campaign promoted one offer: map each campaign to its offer and the report splits. A campaign that promoted both can’t be split. If leadership will keep asking, record the offer type from now on.
Which of these can be fixed after the clicks are recorded, and why? (a) FB and facebook; (b) mailchimp and newsletter; (c) product line missing, where each campaign promoted one line; (d) product line missing on a campaign that promoted both lines.
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(a) Yes, by a remap: both spellings meant Facebook. (b) No: mailchimp was stamped on newsletters and promotions alike, so one spelling hides two meanings. (c) Yes, by a lookup: the campaign tells you the line. (d) Never: nothing recorded says which line each ad promoted.
A colleague wants eight dimensions from day one, so the taxonomy never has to change. What do you weigh?
Show answerHide answer
Each dimension is a choice everyone has to get right on every link, and an unused field gets filled in carelessly. Against that, a dimension added later covers only the clicks from that day. Record now the dimensions whose questions you can see coming; let the rest wait for a question that comes back.
In one line
A report can only group by what was recorded, and nothing can be added to clicks already made. Decide your dimensions from the reports you need, before the next campaign's first link.
Before the next chapter
Write down three questions you wish your campaign reports could answer. Next to each, write the fact a click would have to carry to answer it.