Capturing Click Data

Capturing accurate click data is very simple with C3 Metrics and follows a standard protocol.  This article will provide an overview of the C3 tagging protocol and teach you how to properly tag your Display, Paid Search Paid Social (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.), Affiliates and your Email campaigns.

Read This Tagging Rule First

When adding parameters to any URL, there's a simple rule which MUST be followed or your links may stop working.  The rule has to do with whether you use a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) when adding to your link.  

It is really simple:  the first parameter added to a link has to use the question mark.  

For example, if your link is http://mydomain.com/123.html and you're adding a C3 Metrics tag for Facebook, the resulting URL would be following:

http://mydomain.com/123.html?c3ch=Paid%20Social&c3nid=Facebook 

Notice how the first parameter is using a question mark (/?)

If your link was instead   http://mydomain.com/123.html/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_creative=red-dress, the resulting URL would be:

http://mydomain.com/123.html?utm_source=Facebook&utm_creative=red-dress&c3ch=Paid%20Social&c3nid=Facebook 

Display Ads

• Additional parameters for creative (c3creative), placement (c3placement) and size (c3size) can also be added.
• View-thru data can also be captured.

Paid Search / SEM

Tagging for Paid Search is very simple, whether you're running the campaign yourself or integrating via a bid management platform. 

Select your Platform below for detailed instructions:

• Paid Search Help article

Facebook

Facebook is tagged via the URL query string.  The C3 tag present on your landing page captures the data from the query string in the destination URL.

The standard tagging for Facebook is to add the following query string to your click-through destination URL:

If your campaign is working with a vendor which has the ability to pass the Facebook Ad ID to C3, you may wish to create a separate Channel for Facebook and pass that value as follows:

Twitter

Twitter is tagged via the URL query string.  The C3 tag present on your landing page captures the data from the query string in the destination URL.

The standard tagging for Twitter is to add the following query string to your click-through destination URL:

If your campaign is working with a vendor which has the ability to pass the Twitter Ad ID to C3, you may wish to create a separate Channel for Twitter and pass that value as follows:

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Programs are tagged via the URL query string. The C3 tag present on your landing page captures the data from the query string in the destination URL. For this reason, C3 is able to work with every Affiliate program from CJ and LinkShare all the way down to a home-grown affiliate network!

The standard tagging for an Affiliate program would be to add the following query string to your click-through destination URL:

This will attribute value across your entire Affiliate program and allow you to discover which affiliate are driving value at the top of the funnel, vs jumping in at the last second.

Commission Junction

To track campaign performance down to the Publisher level, instruct CJ to expose the Publisher CID within the destination URL as the c3nid parameter as follows:

With this data, C3 will match the Publisher CID from a Publisher Report which can be generated within the CJ Reporting interface.

LinkShare

LinkShare Advertisers will be able to utilize the siteID= parameter without having to make any additional changes.  This direct integration provides C3 with the encrypted Publisher ID for every click.  Just inform C3 Networks Ops that you are running with LinkShare and the integration is automatic.  

If you're LinkShare program is not utilizing the siteID= parameter, integration would be as follows:

Email

To capture click data from your Email campaign, you will utilize the channel parameter (c3ch) and the network parameter (c3nid)

Landing Page Redirection

There are occasions where your landing page strips out any variables in the query string to do a quick redirect.  When this happens, the C3 Site Tag is not able to capture the click data for proper attribution.

Passing Data Directly To The Site Tag

If you wish to pass data via the C3 Site Tag, you will need to utilize the 'c3qs' parameter, of which there are two choices:

• c3qs=1
  C3 will only capture the values sent directly within the query string
• c3qs=3
  C3 to capture both the query string it is passed, plus capture additional data in the URL

Where xxx is the CID