One thing that can be difficult to detect is whether your campaign tracking codes are “falling off”. There are a variety of reasons they can break or fall off: in the query string syntax or publishing process, or if your IT team adds a redirect to the landing page URL.

One way to detect if your campaign codes might be falling off is to look at the % of your traffic that comes from the Typed/Bookmark bucket (aka, "No Referral" Traffic). Here’s my theory.

You can’t artificially deflate Typed/Bookmark traffic, but it can be artificially inflated when campaign codes fall off. You should be able to look at a historical trend of the % of your traffic that is from Typed/Bookmark. As a % of total traffic, it shouldn’t increase drastically. If it there’s a big PR or social media campaigns, referrals from PR and social media sites should still rise more than Typed/Bookmark.

Note, I’m assuming that all PR events nowadays generate referral traffic from news/social media sites.

How often, anymore, do you have a purely offline PR event that drives online traffic directly to your site. If you are using any social media listening tools, you should be able to detect this PR somewhere. Therefore, you can reasonable assume that only paid campaigns with a query string can artificially inflate your Typed/Bookmark as a % of total traffic. (Again, normalizing it against total traffic is key to this theory).

So, my conclusion is this: Typed/Bookmark traffic should not spike as a % of total traffic. If it does, then I would start looking into whether your campaign codes are dropping off somewhere. Test your campaign landing pages and make sure they don’t redirect. Check with your marketing team to see examples of campaigns “in the wild” and test the campaign links to make sure they are working correctly.