Wrong KPIs with SAP Marketing Cloud Landing Pages?

[stefansickert2]

Hello SAP-community,

our customer created a form, embedded it in an landingpage, exported the HTML and published it with SAP Marketing Cloud. The exported html then was hosted externally.

After finishing multiple LinkedIn campaigns, aiming with all advertisments at the same URL (=the one of the hosted landingpage), the following effect was observed:

• Now, comparing the KPIs of SMC and LinkedIn there is a high difference
• (provided by SMC standard in Content Studio and LinkedIn Ads Manager) The KPIs of LinkedIn -> the clicks to the landingpage are 20x higher than the tracked views of the landing page.

Which effect are we missing here? It would be great to understand how SMC counts its views and other metrics for the forms/landingpages.

I thought that it may have something to do with the fact that the website is exported and hosted externally, but not sure yet. At least after publishing the landing page in SMC Content Studio, visiting it via the automatically generated SMC-URL and subscribing via the embedded form, works perfectly and is also counted correctly.

I will also update this post, if my tests are done.

I would be very thankful for your ideas!

Many thanks in advance,
Best regards, Stefan

[KunalBansal]

Hi Stefan,

[stefansickert2]

Hi all,

[stefansickert2]

Hi all, a short update from my side - We tested it in detail and can confirm that every SAP component tracked 100% the interactions correctly. So we can only look into the direction of the linkedin measures itself. But for now, we can rely on the SAP metrics!

fyi - @KunalBansal 

[KunalBansal]

Hello @stefansickert2,

Long time, hope you're well.

Here are my suggestions based on my knowledge to help figure out the potential reason - 

> LinkedIn counts click on ad-link click, regardless page fully loads or script is fired.
> SMC likely counts a view when the page fully loads and the SMC tracking script fires.

Potentially, these are a few of the points to consider-

1. might have Ad-blockers or browser settings that prevent tracking scripts
2. landing page loaded slowly (check LP performance issues), users might navigate away, leading to less count in SMC
3. also recommend considering using UTM parameters for validation of link-clicks

I hope this answers your query.

Thanks and Regards,
Kunal Bansal
SAP CX Solution Architect

[stefansickert2]

Hi @KunalBansal ,
thanks for your reply! Great to "see" you again.

Your answers makes totally sense to me and we are already evaluating Google Analytics with the UTM parameters as "neutral 3rd party opinion" for the future. In this scenario it was unfortunatly not used.

You wrote "SMC likely counts a view when the page fully loads and the SMC tracking script fires"

I was hoping for an indication like "The script does NOT fire if" (and the views on SMC side are NOT counted) .... i.e. the landing pages is hosted externally (as we did), because xxx.

WHY? - We also thought about the options of add blockers and similar mechanics which would make the results asymmetrical. It seems unrealistic that the relation of LinkedIn:SMC is 22:1 only because of that. So the reason for this behaviour must be more structural from our perspective.
Next thing, we do now, is testing the (externally hosted) landing page incl. form and see if every step is tracked by SMC or not and I hope this shows i.e. that "externally hosted" means "is not tracked by SMC standard analytics" (or something similar).

I will keep this post updated.
Best regards,
Stefan

[KunalBansal]

Hi Stefan, Indeed it's unrealistic difference of LinkedIn:SMC is 22:01, please keep me posted. I hope you've alerady submitted a SAP Ticket as well.