Marketing Campaigns

How it works

The mechanics of this kit, plainly — what runs and when, where the data lands, and what you look at.

• Campaign pull runs mondays · 8am and keeps the Campaigns dashboard fresh. Every Monday: the week's sessions and conversions per campaign, filed and drawn — and a card only when something moved.
• What is captured lands in the Campaign register record, which lives at Data/Campaign Register in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• What is captured lands in the Weekly record, which lives at Data/Marketing Snapshots in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• The Campaigns dashboard reads from the record and shows, at a glance: sessions by channel · conversion rate · every week on the record · sessions, month by month · on the register · by status · where the sessions came from · top pages in search · last 28 days · the campaigns · the weeks, campaign by campaign · every campaign · how this board works.

The wiring, in one breath: Campaign capture writes to Campaign register · Campaign pull writes to Weekly record · Campaign register shown by Campaigns · Weekly record shown by Campaigns · Campaigns kept fresh by Campaign pull · Campaign capture given to Thistle · Campaign review given to Thistle.

Getting the most from it

A kit earns its place when it changes what you look at and what you say, not when it is installed. This is the rhythm that makes it pay.

• Let the Monday pull do the reading; your job is the glance. Open Campaigns after it runs and read Sessions by channel against The weeks — the bar says where the traffic came from, the table says which campaign inside that channel earned it, and the two together are the only honest way to answer "is this worth it".
• Say it in passing and it is filed: "we're running a partner roundup, tagged partner-roundup, three hundred and eighty budget", "the spring launch finished on Friday", "we spent two-forty on it last week". Campaign capture writes the row in your words, and with two campaigns that could fit it asks which — it never guesses.
• Fill in What it is for on every campaign, early. It is the one column your analytics property can never supply, and it is what turns a row of session counts into something you can make a decision about. Thistle asks for it at the calibration and never invents one.
• Ask before you argue: "how did the spring launch actually do?" Campaign review reads the whole run back — total sessions, total conversions, the pooled rate, the best week and the quietest — and states which property, which dates and which conversions it counted, so the number is checkable rather than just quotable.
• Treat a blank as information. A campaign with no budget has no budget recorded, not a free one, and a week with no cost is a week nobody costed — nothing on this board fills a gap with an estimate, which is exactly why the totals can be trusted.
• Keep the UTM conventions tidy and the register stays honest by itself. When you notice one campaign tagged two ways, tell Thistle they are the same thing: it keeps one row with both spellings and marks the other merged, so next Monday's pull files everything against one campaign instead of two.

Make it yours

Nothing here is fixed. The pieces are ordinary agents, routines, records and dashboards, so anything you know about shaping those applies. Retire whatever earns nothing.

Things people usually change first

Say any of these in chat, or edit them on the kit’s page in the app.

• Which analytics property and Search Console site are yours — said once, remembered, so no later pull has to choose.
• Which conversion counts. Out of the box the pull takes every conversion your property counts; name the event you actually care about and the rate on the board narrows to it.
• What each campaign is for, and what it costs — both are yours to write, and both stay exactly as you said them.
• When the pull runs, or pausing it and keeping the board and the records as they stand.
• Whether Thistle may read your Tag Manager container. Nothing reaches it until you connect it and say so, and even then it only ever reads what is there.

Your first run

Installing starts a short setup conversation — not a form. Answer roughly, correct later.

1. Adding the Kit offers the first pull right away: connect analytics and Search Console on the same screen, start it with one tap, and watch it read everything your property still remembers — every campaign name it ever saw tagged, week by week — and build both the register and the weekly record from it. The board has a year of trend on it before you have typed a campaign name. Prefer not to connect? Tell Thistle what you are running instead, and the register builds by hand.
2. When that first pull finishes, Thistle leaves a short note in your 1Presence inbox saying what it filed — how many campaigns, across how many channels — and invites a few minutes together on the three things only you know: which UTM names are really one campaign, what each campaign is actually for, and which conversion is the one you care about. That is also where budgets go on, if you have them.
3. From then on the pull runs every Monday morning, reads only the weeks since the last one it filed, corrects a week rather than doubling it, redraws the board, and raises a card only when something genuinely moved — a campaign whose traffic shifted by more than a third, one it has marked finished, or a campaign your property reports that is not on the register yet.
4. Nothing here changes a tag, a property, a page or a sitemap, and nothing here sends anything to anyone. Thistle will tell you what the record shows and will not tell you where to spend next.

Watch the first pass, then tell it what you would have done differently — that correction teaches it more than any setup could.

The essentials

Learning, preferences and run costs work the same in every kit — so they are covered once, in the Kits guide.

Living with a Kit — the Kits guide →

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