Tracking Direct Email Marketing Campaigns with Google Analytics

We can track any email marketing campaign with Google Analytics. It’s quite simple: your URL has a ‘tail’ that bears all the necessary information about your direct email marketing campaign. Detecting such ‘tail’ Google Analytics divides it into pieces, to understand which advertising campaign the visitor belongs to.

Here is what you should do to track your email marketing campaigns with Google Analytics:

• Of course you need a Google Analytisc account.
• You must place the Google Analytics code onto every page you want to track.
• In order for making your email campaigns visible to Google Analytics you must create special landing URLs (this is the ‘tail’ creating process). For this purpose use the Google Analytics URL Builder tool, that looks as follows:
  
  

It is very easy to work with URL builder tool.

• Enter the landing URL In the Website URL field.
• Fill in the Campaign Source field. This parameter identifies the email marketing campaign that the email belongs to. It can represent the name of your campaign, the sending date (in my case), etc.
• Fill in the Campaign Medium field. This parameter describes how the message got to the visitor. In my case it is a weekly newsletter.
• Fill in the Name field. Traditionally, in link tagging, the campaign name is the ‘who’ attribute. It describes who you’re working with to push a message out. This may be a segment of your recipient list.
• Push the Generate URL button.
• Get a tagged URL, that looks as follows: http://www.site.com/?utm_source=150210&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=hotels

If you’ll take a good look at this URL you may notice the information that you have filled in the fields: for example parameter utm_source is the sending date, the utm_medium is the type of advertising and the utm_campaign is the category from your recipients list.

The report of this email campaign will looks as following in Google Analytics report:

The values used in the link tags are pulled directly into Google Analytics. Each parameter becomes the foundation for a report. You can measure the performance of your direct email marketing campaigns by finding the values you use for utm_campaign, utm_source or for utm_medium.