Email & Web Analytics – the perfect combination.
Email marketing is definitely not new; most web marketing professionals have been doing this for sometime. But is it really working for your company?
In our experience the typical email marketing process goes something along the lines of:
- Build the list
- Create and send the email message
- Monitor the statistics for number of messages sent, bounced, opened and clicks to the website.
- Hope that something positive happens.
Whilst some more advanced email marketing tools have a conversion tracking system to count sales or forms completed, in reality the details provided by these tools are not sufficient to determine the real success of the campaign. For instance what happens if the visitor didn’t convert online but viewed the contact page instead? What if they viewed 3 product pages and intended to come back later to purchase? How many clicked on a link to visit the site and then left immediately?
These and other more detailed questions are not usually answered by your email marketing reports, but by your web analytics application.
Getting your email marketing integrated with your web analytics application can be done easily in both ClickTracks and Google Analytics.
In both cases you will need to tag each of the links in your email so that you can track the clicks from the email.
By examining the results in your web analytics application and not just in your email program you can learn a lot more about what people did after they clicked through to your website. You can look at the content that they viewed, how long they stayed on the site, where they left and actions that they took whilst they were there.
This information is invaluable in estimating the actual value of the email campaign beyond immediate conversions and can assist you to develop future campaigns.
Email Tracking in ClickTracks
ClickTracks offers both simple and advanced tracking for email campaigns. The quick and simple method is to use the custom campaign function which uses a landing page or tracking URL parameter to identify clicks to the website via the campaign. E.g. http://www.yoursite.com/?src=spring07 to identify the clicks from the email. Once this has been set up in your email marketing you will see a report like:
This is good; however more advanced email campaign analysis is also possible with ClickTracks if you use Lyris' ListManager, Intellicontact Pro, SubscriberMail or Inwise services. You can do this without using these services but the process is more complex. Additionally once revenue tracking has been enabled, then more detailed reports on the return on investment in the campaign is also available.
Once integrated with these services ClickTracks can use the user's behaviour to create segmented mailing lists that can be used for future mail outs. By combining the powerful labelling system and the email campaigns a segmented mailing list can be easily created and exported for later use. For instance if you want to send a follow up offer to all visitors who clicked through from your email and saw a specific page such as a discount on a product but who didn't purchase, then you can create such a list. The techniques of how to do this will be covered in a future article.
Panalysis will be demonstrating this feature of ClickTracks in a series of breakfast seminars during November in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra. Details and registration for these events are available here.
For a personal demonstration of ClickTracks and tracking email campaigns, please contact the sales team at Panalysis.
Email Tracking in Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides a simple URL Builder tool that you can use to create each of the links to be included in your email with the correct tags. To use this correctly for email you should complete each of the following fields:
Campaign Source: If you are sending the email then set this to your company or the email service provider's name. Keep this the same for all links in the email message.
Campaign Medium: Set this to email and keep it the same for all links in the email.
Campaign Term: leave this blank
Campaign Content: Set this to a meaningful description for the link in the email. E.g. if the link points to a special offer on shoes call it "shoes offer". This should be repeated for each link in the email.
Campaign Name: A meaningful name to describe the email campaign. This is kept the same for every link in the email.
You will need to repeat this process for each link in the email message.
You should do a test run and click on all of the links at least once in the email. After 24 hours you can then check the results in Google Analytics by going to the report:
Traffic Sources -> Campaigns. Locate the campaign name that you specified in the email message and click on the link to view the campaign details. Open the drop down menu "Segment by" and then select Ad Content to see each of the links that were clicked in the email message.
Each of these rows shows the break down of the page views per visit for each visitor coming from the links in the email as well as their time on site, bounce rate as well as goal and ecommerce related statistics.
This information tells me that the web design article from our last newsletter is the most viewed article and has generated a good time on site for those visitors clicking on the link.
Panalysis can tag your email campaigns for you. From just $50 per email campaign we can tag and test your integration with Google Analytics. Please contact sales for further details.
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