There are three different types of taxonomy that apply to the digital marketing space: Web, Content, and Campaign. We’ll review each of them in a series of blog posts in an attempt to better explain their similarities, differences, and importance when considering your digital marketing efforts.
Campaign taxonomy refers to the process of categorizing and organizing the channels used for digital ad and digital marketing placement. FYI – it is also called Channel or Placement taxonomy, but it all means the same thing. This process involves breaking down your paid and social media placements into a series of smaller, more organized parts; these make it easier to manage and analyze the performance of each component (or tag) of your campaign across all channels and topics. Some tag examples are ad types, media mix, campaign goals and objectives, and more.
Campaign taxonomy is the “where” while content taxonomy is often the “what”. However, campaign taxonomy breaks down the channel where it’s being viewed, because while you have content on your website and content in your campaign assets, you likely would reuse pieces of content across lots of different media types. For example, you might have a video that is hosted on your website and also leveraged in your social media campaigns. In this instance, the content taxonomy would be tagged the same for the video, but the campaign taxonomy would be different based on where it is seen.
Campaign taxonomy is extremely helpful with your paid media strategy. One of the most important aspects of campaign taxonomy is categorizing your tag ‘channel types’. Some common values are display ads, emails, organic search, or paid social. By organizing your channels into a taxonomy, you can better understand which digital source is most effective at driving results and create campaigns that target your audience effectively.
Back to that video scenario… If you merely tracked how many views the video had, you’d miss out on understanding the source of the traffic. And if you knew that your paid social post that featured the video was responsible for 4x the views, then you’d be more likely to use other videos in your paid social campaign. Marry that with your content taxonomy (which tells you videos with dogs are the most popular) and your web taxonomy (which tells you that users who watch a video are more likely to engage with you by opting-in for marketing emails), you’d likely redo your marketing strategy to include new dog videos every few weeks!
Also, campaign taxonomy involves organizing your channels by geography. Imagine marketing tipping off sales that you’ve seen a sudden spike in lead-gen form submissions from the Atlanta area. It’s likely that the sales manager would want to talk to their local rep about what activity they’re generating on the ground, or understand the quality of the leads to provide feedback to marketing.
Finally, campaign taxonomy can be useful to track things like QR codes on printed materials or time-bound campaigns (like a convention or event), because you’re able to generate a unique URL that is categorized appropriately. Without a campaign taxonomy in place you might see an increase in orders for the new super-duper no-iron elastic-waistband trouser you’re advertising on TV, and attribute that increase in orders during a specific time period that coincides with your media buy. With a good taxonomy in place, you’d be able to track the actual visits to the product’s page, because the QR code you feature in your TV ad is tagged to that channel.
Roots is able to help you with your taxonomy standards on the front-end so that your reporting is comparing apples-to-apples. Imagine being able to run a report to see all the places that your branded product images have run, and then to see which channel produced the most traffic from that image… or looking at all of the content created for your primary buyer persona and reviewing which singular piece of content had the most engagement. You’d be able to alter your media mix, or change your messaging with an increased velocity of decision making that you likely don’t have with the tools you use today.
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