Simple Google Analytics email tracking

Background

Email marketing has become an important part of companies' marketing strategies, but there are countless ways to carry out digital marketing these days. E-mail marketing is only one part of the big picture. When one should analyze the results of for example a campaign, it is useful to gather data from all marketing channels into one system in order to get the overall picture.

This post will explain how you can track results from a Mailing using SuperOffice and look it up in Google Analytics together with all your other data.

What we’ll be doing

We will be setting up a Google Analytics account. Creating Links and Tracked Links in SuperOffice that will post results to Google Analytics. Then finally display these results in Google Analytics.

To follow this guide you will need a existing web site with a domain name.

Setting up a Google Analytics account

Go to http://analytics.google.com and sign up to access Google Analytics. When creating a new account give it an appropriate account name.

Next you will need to set up the property (web site), like this:

Now you can go grab your tracking code. Copy and paste this into the code of every page you want to track. Place it right before the ending </head> tag.

When you have implemented the code, enter the URL of your website in your browser. Now go back to Google Analytics -> Reporting -> Real-Time -> Overview. If you did everything, correct the widget Right now should display 1 active user.

Creating trackable links in SuperOffice

First, you need to setup a new mailing. In this example, I have created a newsletter where I would like to track how many users have clicked the Read More link. Of course, we would like to view these data in Google Analytics. We will only be going through the part of creating the link.

When creating the link in SuperOffice we it asks for an URL. To be able to see that the user is coming from the newsletter you need to add some relevant parameters to the URL. These are:

• Campaign Source (utm_source). Required. Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or other source. Example: utm_source=newsletter June 2015
• Campaign Medium (utm_medium). Required. Use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email or cost-per- click. Example: utm_medium=email
• Campaign Content (utm_content). Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL. Examples: utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink
• Campaign Name (utm_campaign). Used for keyword analysis. Use utm_campaign to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign. Example: utm_campaign=newsletters

The final URL should be something like this:

Http://www.somecorp.com/index.html?utm_source=newsletter%20june%202015&utm_medium=email&utm_content=textlink&utm__campaign=newsletters

Remember that URLs do not handle spaces, so you need to replace spaces with %20 in the URL. Google also has a URL builder to help you generate these URLs: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867

The URL you created or generated with URL builder you paste in the URL field for a link, like shown below:

Or you can insert the same URL in a tracked link, like this:

Now we are ready to send the newsletter. When you have sent the newsletter, head on over back to Google Analytics.

You will now see the traffic generated by your e-mail newsletter. As you see in the image, you can see statistics for the campaign Newsletter June 2015. You will also see which medium these users are coming from and the number of clicks for each medium. This will enable us to compare which medium is generating most clicks.

Start exploring the possibilities!