What Is Metadata in Digital Campaigns?
What Is Metadata in Digital Campaigns?
What is metadata? In short, metadata is extra information about something – a book, product, or marketing campaign – that enables you to compare it against the rest of its kind.
Take a T-shirt, for example. It’s metadata would include its size, color, fabric and brand. Meanwhile, a book’s metadata would include its author, genre, length, year published, language, etc.
What Is Marketing Campaign Metadata
If you manage a marketing campaign, its metadata will include things like:
- Campaign start date
- End date
- Promotional channel
- Call to action
- Locale
- Audience
- Content
- Tactic
- Landing page
- Type (awareness, leadgen, conversion, etc)
- Business Unit
- Brand or product name, etc.
These attributes in essence enable you to compare your campaigns with each other.
This way, you can see which one performs the best, see how specific business goals are met, and process that information for reporting purposes.
Every metadata component allows you to group, sort, or filter on it. If you use all the metadata attributes for your campaigns, you can sort and compare them against every one of them in tools like Google Analytics.
The metadata is usually structured in a template and has specific format and naming conventions. It works best if applied consistently across all your campaigns.
What is Metadata – An Example
A classic example of digital marketing campaign metadata are the Google Analytics UTM parameters added to campaign destination URLs.
These UTM tags have specific naming conventions and formatting which have to be followed exactly.
Whenever you follow them, you get great insights about how well your campaigns drive traffic to your website.
By the same token, inconsistent metadata leads to unreliable insights. As a result, you might make budgetary or promotional decisions that could have low or negative ROI.
Metadata can be of various types, including descriptive (like the T-shirt example) or structural.
Specifically, an example of structural metadata is search engines, which use UTM tags to rank webpages.
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