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Done well, a targeted e-mail campaign with links to your site can be an extremely effective and inexpensive sales tool. Once sent, it’s important to be able to track how successful your e-mail campaign has been. Thankfully, Google Analytics provides a simple and effective way to track the traffic. If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, you can learn how to set one up (and a lot more besides) on our Google Analytics training course. Google also have a guide to installing Analytics here.

Once you’ve got Google Analytics set up, this simple step by step guide will enable youto track all of the traffic from the links in your e-mail.

Google Analytics EMail Tracking – 5 Step Guide:

OK – so you’ve written your e-mail and you’re ready to add links to the text and images that you hope will drive hordes visitors to your site.

Step 1)

Before you add any links at all to your e-mail, your need to generate special modified URLs that will enable Google Analytics to track how many people follow them (and what they do afterwards). To do this, you need to visit the Google Analytics URL Builder

Step 2)

The URL Builder is a simple form – just complete the fields to build your URL

The fields are:

Website URL: Put  URL that you are linking to from your e-mail in here – this is a required field (obviously)

Campaign Source: Here you can give your e-mail a name – if your e-mail is a newsletter, call it “newsletter”, if it’s a special offer to certain customers, call it “specialoffer” – you can call it anything you like to help you to identify it in the Analytics data later. Note – if you’re sending lots of different e-mails as part of the same campaign, give them the different names, but use the same Campaign Name (below) for all of them.

Campaign Medium: As we’re running an email campaign, put “email” in here (although its worth noting that you can use Google Analytics to track links from anywhere)

Campaign Term: This field is used for paid search campaigns – you can leave this blank.

Campaign Content: If you’re putting more than one links to the same URL in your newsletter, you can use this field to differentiate between them in the Analytics results. For instance, if one of your links is from a piece of text and the other is from an image, you can put “textlink” for one and “imagelink” for the other, and see which one most people clicked on – this can be really helpful in finding out what induced most people to visit your site, so that you can replicate it in future.

Campaign Name: You can give your whole campaign a name here – e.g “January-Sale” or “New-Product-Launch”. There might be lots of different advertising that makes up your campaign, of which your e-mail is just a part. You can use the “Campaign Source” field above to differentiate between the different parts of your campaign.

Once you’ve completed all of the fields, hit “Generate URL” and the URL builder will give you your special tracked URL to use in your e-mail. It looks long winded, but don’t worry – it’ll still link to your web-page and your users will know no different! Cunning eh!

Step 3)

Insert your newly generated URLs in to your e-mail. How you do this will depend on what piece of software you are using to write your e-mail in – just do what you would normally do, but add your URL Builder URLs instead of just straight links to your site.

Step 4)

Send your e-mail out to your distribution list and wait…

Step 5)

OK – here’s the exciting part! Once you’ve left enough time for your e-mail to have been received and read by your recipients, you can log in to Google Analytics and start looking at the results to see how successful you’ve been.

From the main Google Analytics dashboard, select Traffic Sources and then Campaigns from the menu bar on the left

You’ll be taken to a new page with a list of all of your campaigns (there will only be one if this is your first go!), and a new graph which shows how much traffic you’ve had from your campaigns as a whole.

From here, you can drill down in to each campaign and see how effective it’s been with all of the great data that Google Analytics has to offer.

Try this out – select your campaign from the list and you’ll be presented with a new page with details of the number of visits it has generated, how many pages per visit the average user accessed, the average time on site, % new visits (compared to returning visitors) bounce rate etc…

You can also use the simple filters from the drop down menus to investigate how much traffic each Campaign Source, Medium, Link etc… generated (that’s why we put all the detail in to the URL builder earlier) so that you can replicate the most successful parts in future campaigns.

Google Analytics contains a whole host of very powerful reporting and goal-setting tools that we don’t have room to explain in detail here.

All of this and more is covered on our hands-on Google Analytics Training and Advanced Google Analytics Training courses.

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Google Analytics, Google Analytics Email Tracking, Google Analytics Training, Google Analytics URL Builder, Track Mailshots with Google Analytics, Tracking links with Google Analytics

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This entry was posted by Colin Welch on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 4:45 pm and is filed under New Free Resources, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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