How to track emails in Google Analytics

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Email Marketing is slowly moving from sending a full image “blast” to “what can we do next”.

I was very enthused to talk to a client who want to track email click throughs in their Google Analytics Report.  Email Marketing is slowly moving from sending a full image “blast” to “what can we do next”.  Don’t even get me started on what all you can do with the analytics reports!  That post is for some other time in this post I show you how to track your email campaigns in Google Analytics.

There is simple way you can track clicks from your links outside your website in Google Analytics, like from a banner on a certain website or a link in an email. You can track the clicks using the URL builder tool.

Google URL Tool Builder

 

(Click to Enlarge)

 

The way to do this is to add a few parameters to the URL.  So if your link is http://www.juvlonkonnect.com then to track that link you can add a few parameters like http://www.juvlonkonnect.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EmailTrendsReport

When someone clicks this link and visits www.juvlon.com website, the Google Analytics code on the website will read the parameters and show the clicks in the reports.

Here are the parameters:

  1. Campaign Medium: Should always be Email for email link tracking.
  2. Campaign Source: What type of email was it? Newsletter? Promo / sale / discount email? Third party email – (when your email is sent by your partners) Diwali offer etc.
  3. Campaign Name: I recommend using a date the email was sent and the naming of the campaign. The format of SrNo_ddmmyy_campaignname could be useful  in excel sheet manipulations and reporting.
  4. Campaign Term (Optional): This is usually the used for keywords in online advertisements. For email you could use the subject line of the email in this parameter.
  5. Campaign Content(Optional)

So the above link really means: http://www.juvlonkonnect.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EmailTrendsReport

Here is the generic link to remember which parameter stands for what:
http://www.example.com/? utm_medium=email&utm_source=typeofemail&utm_campaign=nameofcampaign

To see the reports in Google Analytics:

Simply go to Traffic Sources and then to All Traffic Sources filter for “email”.

 

 

Pretty simple, really.

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