Let us know what you’re looking for. We strive to respond in 48 hours, but, every now and then, life gets in the way, so be patient if there’s a delay.
Part one of this series discussed an easy way to set up email tracking for your campaigns using Google’s URL Builder. After you’ve built your URL (see part one of this post for more on that), you should test it. It’d be a disappointment if you log-in to Google Analytics hoping to see great data on your latest campaign only to find nothing or something that doesn’t make any sense!
To test:
1. Copy URL that Google’s URL Builder generated for you.
2. Paste your URL in a browser and hit “Enter.” Make sure to verify you copied the entire URL by comparing yours to the URL Builder’s.
3. Keeping the tab with your URL open, use another tab or window to view your Google Analytics account and navigate to the Reporting page > Real-Time > Traffic Sources.
4. You should see the details of your campaign here as you entered them in the URL builder. If you don’t see it right away, be patient and wait a few minutes for Google Analytics to pick up your activity. If you use IP blocking to keep Google Analytics from collecting data from your internal IPs, make sure you’re in a view that doesn’t have IP blocking turned on.
5. Check to make sure Analytics is recording your info (Medium, Source, etc) as you want it to.
6. Return to the URL Builder and adjust your URL as needed.
If you send a lot of emails and decide that Google Analytics email tracking is right for you, you should explore how to better integrate it into your workflow. For example, some email marketing solutions allow you to integrate your Google Analytics data with the email tracking data they collect. (Corporate Zen has experience with most email marketing solutions and can help you with this setup if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself.) Once you’ve got your email tracking set up, you might want to go deeper in your analysis and create an advanced segment. Smart Insights has a nice post on how to do this. This is a little more advanced, so you may want to consult a professional for help.
If you’re already using Google Analytics, setting up basic email tracking for your campaigns shouldn’t take you long at all and will give you valuable data on how your email campaigns are performing. If you want help or would like to see what else can be done with Google Analytics, feel free to reach out to me through Corporate Zen’s contact page or do some research and find another reputable Google Analytics specialist. Stay tuned for more posts on Google Analytics and email data gathering and tracking. Hope this tip is useful!