How to integrate Google Analytics into your newsletters to better track their effectiveness
No matter what email marketing company you use to send out your email newsletters, you have the ability to view the reports. Some are better than others, but the basic reporting statistics tell you how many users opened your newsletter, how many clicked on a link, how many emails bounced, etc.
Google Analytics allows you to go a step further by allowing you to:
- See what links people use to get to your site
- What they did once they are on the site
- And by analyzing the reports, you can learn how you can enhance your visitor experience on your site
Here is how you can integrate Google Analytics in to your newsletters so you can track the visitor results:
1. If you don’t have a Google Analytics account, create an account.
2. Add the url of the website you want to start tracking. Once you add your site, you will be given a piece of javascript code that you have to add to all of the website pages that you would like to track.
3. When you add links to your newsletter, add a unique parameter to all of the links to help Google Analytics track the specific urls.
For Example:
If I had a membership link in my newsletter, my link would look like this: http://www.webgrrls.com/membership/index.php?newsletter-date=03-20-08
If I had an events link, my link would look like this:
http://www.webgrrls.com/events/index.php?newsletter-date=03-20-08
In this case, the parameter is newsletter-date=03-20-08. Using date as the parameter, will help me identify the newsletter by date. (Note: You need ? before you use the parameter and if you have mulitple parameters, separate each parameter with &)
Once an e-mail campaign is properly coded and delivered, Google Analytics will automtically track the URLs and tell you which links were most popular, when they visited your Web site, how long they stayed and where they went once they landed on your site.
You can then analyze your email campagins and adjust them to improve your results.
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thanks so much….just getting started using this. Google directions seem to be quite in depth…perhaps too much so.
appreciate the jump start