If you run an online business that relies on the web then one of the most important aspects to everything that you do is tracking return on investment which includes visitors, click statistics, and page views.
Email marketing is one such place where you can do this very easily – if you are sending out marketing emails to a database of customers or potential customers, then here is a guide that will show you how you can track the success of each campaign using Google Analytics a few tricks.
Create Your HTML Email and Tracking IDs
The first part of the process involves adding a Google tracking code to all the links that are inside your HTML-based email. This is very simple and can be done with the help of something called the Google URL Builder [link]. Once you have that open you will see a number of fields that you need to complete as follows (including examples of what you need to enter):
- Website URL: http://www.techinfoblog.net (yourdomain.com)
- Campaign Source: TechInfoBlog-New-Giveaway
- Campaign Medium: Email-Campaign
- Campaign Name: 20120416-tib-email-marketing-newsletter
You will see other fields on there too, but I tend to ignore them and just use the ones above as they are the most important ones. Once you’ve filled in the fields like you see in the example above you need to press the button to generate the new URL that you are going to use in your email’s HTML. It should look like this if you used the example content:
http://www.techinfoblog.net/?utm_source=TechInfoBlog-New-Giveaway&utm_medium=Email-Campaign&utm_campaign=20120416-tib-email-marketing-newsletter
As you can see, it has converted your original link into a new version which has the Google tracking details added onto the end of it – this is how Google Analytics is going to pick up any clicks that come from the email campaign that you send out if those clicks land on your website.
Send the HTML Email and View Results in Google Analytics
Once your email marketing campaign is ready to send out and you have sent it, it will be worth waiting a few days until you check into Google Analytics to see how it went. Once you are logged in though you can now start to see how this works.
There is an option inside Analytics title “Traffic Source“, so click on that and then select “Campaigns“. In this view it’s possible to see all the tracking IDs codes that you built using the URL Builder – and you can now see all the fantastic information including how many people landed on your website, what they did next, and also whether or not they ended up purchasing from you (if you use e-Commerce on your website).
About the Author:
This guide to tracking email campaigns using Google Analytics was prepared and written by Bob Simmons of www.hondanavigationdvd.net. Bob loves to write about social media, cars, and vehicles plus also runs a number of different websites regarding GPS. Click here if you want to know more about his Honda Navigation DVD website which he recently launched in October of 2011.
That’s interesting i only use analytics for my traffic but surly going to try this one.