Tracking Email Marketing With the Help of Google’s URL Builder
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could track your email marketing campaigns all the way to the point of conversion? If you’re doing email marketing using software from a company like Constant Contact you are able to see analytics for your campaigns up to the point of clicking a link. Unfortunately, once that link is clicked your tracking stops. Luckily Google has a tool that can solve this problem.
Google URL Builder
Google’s URL Builder is a free tool that Google created so Adwords advertisers could tag their landing pages. By tagging their landing pages, advertisers can track Adwords campaigns in Google Analytics (this can now be achieved automatically if you link your Adwords and Google analytics accounts). We can use this same tool to track email marketing campaigns.
Start by going to the Google URL Builder. The page should look like this:
Once at the url builder, type in the url of your landing page. You will now need to fill in the boxes for source, medium, and campaign. For email marketing, you will leave term and content blank. An example source for your campaign is newsletter-may2010. Medium would be email and name would be any promo code, offer, product, etc. that is relevant to the campaign. Once you have filled in the required fields click the button to generate url. The new url will be your original landing page url with a ? and several parameters after it.
Tracking Your Campaign in Google Analytics
After you run your campaign you will now be able to log into Google Analytics and view the traffic generated from your email blast. To view your reports go to Traffic Sources -> All Traffic Sources. This report will show you the source / medium. For example you will see newsletter-may2010 / email. If you would like to also view campaign name select the drop down menu to segment by campaign. You will now see a report that in the first column lists the source / medium and in the second column lists the campaign name.
Tracking your email marketing through the conversion will help you better understand what campaigns are converting and which ones aren’t. You will be able to gain further insight into the effectiveness of your landing page and conversion process.
