What is taxonomy and marketing taxonomy – how it impacts your organization data.
According to Wikipedia, Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. Coming from the Greek words ‘taxis’ that means ‘order or arrangement’ and ‘nomos’ that means ‘law or science’, this structured classification has been used for many decades to identify plants and animals, according to their common characteristics.
Plants and animals are classified based on Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species – each level giving us a clear idea of its habitat, physiology and behaviour.
Taxonomy is important in a number of industries. From classifying books based on author, type of book, intended audience, genre, and popularity; to classifying boxes in a warehouse based on content, SKUs, sizes, destination, access and turnover – taxonomy is used everywhere.
Here are a few industries where it is very important to name, classify, order and analyze based on specific taxonomies. As you can see, this is just a tiny subset, taxonomy is crucial in almost all industries.
All of us would have experienced the benefits of naming and organizing things efficiently in our daily lives. Regardless of whether it’s your personal or professional life, taxonomy is important.
Until now, we were mainly focused on examples of taxonomy in the physical world. Coming into the digital world, one can only imagine how important it is to keep things organized, just because of the sheer volume of data that is generated.
Each request to a server, each social media post, each video view, each new webpage or blog post, each like, comment, or share creates a trail of information that is important to understand online behaviour.
Knowingly or unknowingly, we are all using taxonomy in various levels. We use classifications and naming conventions in organizing our emails, files and folders, reports, personal files, all for the same reasons mentioned above - to help us search and find things easier.
Data taxonomy is very vast field, with data mining, data science, big data, cluster processing, data lakes, distributed file systems and ETL just skimming the surface of the enormous amounts of data produced in the digital world.
In this article, we will focus on Marketing taxonomy, how you need to implement it in your organization, and how it helps.
Marketing taxonomy refers to the classifications and naming conventions used by enterprises to map their customer journey across various platforms or touch points.
Last touch attribution - For a long while, organizations used last touch attribution, the method of giving credit to the last point of interaction of the customer. This is easy to measure and understand, since you do not need to map the entire customer journey.
If the customer purchases something from your website, the credit is given to your website and not to any other channel that contributed to that purchase decision.
Multi touch attribution - With the advent of better digital analytics tools and metrices, it is possible to map a customer’s journey across different platforms that contribute to a successful conversion. Credit can also be allocated in the right proportion to the platform that had the most impact in your customer’s purchase decision.
This is important, not just in an e-commerce environment. It applies to professional services, information websites, social media, apps or any platform that a customer may traverse in their digital journey.
Marketing taxonomy must be implemented across various aspects of your organization’s marketing efforts.
Websites follow a multi-tiered, hierarchical approach with home pages, service pages, sub-service pages, support pages, information pages and so on. Taxonomy is important in naming your pages, organizing them, recording them for future access, taking backups and so on. Things to remember are author names, type of pages, importance, position in your content flow, keywords used and anything else that matters to your organization.
If you want to combine data from different parameters, you can choose one of the parameters as the secondary dimension.
Email marketing campaigns are very effective in lead generation, and most organizations make extensive use of this digital marketing tactic. Naming campaigns based on geographies, number of recipients, products, campaign type, and purpose will help you analyze your campaign information better.
Optimizing your website for search engines is crucial to getting your websites ranked, and thus generating traffic. SEO involves deciding what to call your webpages, the keywords to include, title tags, meta tags, alt tags, article submissions, guest blogging and a bunch of other activities that help your website rank well in search engines.
Optimizing your website for search engines is crucial to getting your websites ranked, and thus generating traffic. SEO involves deciding what to call your webpages, the keywords to include, title tags, meta tags, alt tags, article submissions, guest blogging and a bunch of other activities that help your website rank well in search engines.
All organizations run paid campaigns across PPC engines like Google ads, Bing ads, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and other networks. Naming your campaigns using standard marketing taxonomies can help you get your reports and analytics better organized.
Read more about marketing taxonomy or naming conventions in our comprehensive article.
If you have worked with designers, you might notice that they are not the most organized. They are creative souls who focus on the right side of their brain more than the left side.
But unless you name, classify and order the designs you will end up with folders full of random designs which were used, discarded or half done.
An expensive field of marketing, where taxonomies and proper classifications are crucial to ensure that you advertise in the right places, to the right audience at the right time.
As you can see, all departments of marketing using taxonomies to varying degrees.
CampTag's forte is marketing campaign taxonomy.
The key reasons organizations use marketing taxonomy is for easier Campaign management and more efficient Reporting.
Marketing campaigns that are run without standard naming conventions or taxonomies can lead to incomplete, confusing reports, resulting in many man hours spent on correcting them.
Geography_Source_Medium_Type of Campaign_Product_Category_Offer
Here the dimensions are geography, source, medium etc. and the separator is an ‘_’. This separator should be standard, and will help you split the name into columns in Google sheets based on that character.
NY_instagram_ppc_banner_book_thrillers_new
This is a sample URL for a book seller running campaigns on Instagram for their new arrivals.
You can apply this to any campaign, to ensure that you follow standard, comprehensive marketing campaign taxonomy.
If you would like to know how to build an effective campaign taxonomy, reach out to us about CampTag, the awesome marketing taxonomy and URL builder.