Tracking Email Campaign Visits in Google Analytics

Sending an email campaign to thousands of interested readers is an exciting task for a proactive marketer but it’s not always as easy as throwing together a quick email and pressing send. An effective email campaign requires engaging media, creative copy, effective landing pages, up-to-date contact lists and other marketing resources. After all of the hard work you put into assembling an email campaign, it’s important to make sure you properly track and analyze the traffic received so that you can continuously optimize your messages and drive traffic to your site.

Google Analytics makes it very easy for any marketer to track and analyze email marketing. It does not require expert programming skills, extra re-direct pages, Excel generated charts and most of all – you don’t need access to the server to install tracking code (assuming your GA account is already running). Google Analytics uses a method called ‘Manual Campaign URL Tagging’ which involves appending Urchin Tracking Modules or UTM tags to the end of your URLs. These UTM tags are essentially campaign variables with associated values that will automatically be reported and segmented in your Analytics reports. There are five specific variables available when manually tagging URLs for email campaigns including source, medium, campaign, content and term. Depending on your reporting objectives you may append some or all of the UTM tags.

Let’s start by analyzing where the traffic will appear in Google Analytics. This will help choose what variables you should include in your destination URLs. As shown below, email campaign traffic will appear in Traffic Sources > All Traffic Sources > Show: Medium > Email. If you have numerous medium, you can use the search box to find the ‘email’ medium. If you have not yet used email UTM tags, then the ‘email’ medium will not appear. You may also find your data set in ‘All Traffic Sources’ as Source/Medium although it will often be hidden amongst many other sources.

When you’re looking at the email traffic dashboard, you will see that you can analyze your traffic by different dimensions i.e. medium, campaign, keyword, ad content, visitor type and landing page.

*Notice:  The top dimensions available correlate directly with the URL variables that you can append to your URLs. Navigating the various dimensions will help you decide which variables make most sense for your company and email marketing structure.

While in the email traffic dashboard, Google Analytics provides their 5 standard quality metrics for analyzing any data set; Visits, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, % New Visits, & Bounce Rate. Each of these metrics can be extremely useful when analyzing the various dimensions of your email campaign traffic.

*If tagged correctly your ‘Direct’ traffic source data will probably experience a decrease in visits. Although you’ll show a brief negative trend, it’s important to distinguish promotional traffic from direct traffic because each metric is frequently used in marketing decision making. If you’re not tagging destination URLs for email campaigns, all the traffic you receive will appear as direct because the user essentially went directly to your site bypassing any search engines, referring sites, advertisements, etc.

Manual Campaign URL Tagging using Urchin Tracking Modules (utm tags)

When writing an email campaign you will include various links in your email that direct readers to your website for more information. For each link you include, you will want to append the Google Analytic utm tags to your destination URLs. To tag a URL, you have to add a question mark to the end of your URL, followed by the utm tag and an equal sign which then identifies the value you assign to the traffic. If you are using more than one variable (which you should) simply add an ampersand in between the variables. See the example below:

www.destinationurl.com/gregsblog/example/?utm_source=companyname&utm_medium=email

Let’s look at the available variables that Google Analytics offers i.e. source, medium, campaign, content, and term and see how you can apply them specifically to email campaigns. Using the UTM tags below we will build this URI:

?utm_source=companyname&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=productXYZpromotion&utm_content=creative_copy1&utm_term=mediatype1

*The URI is the content that appears after the question mark (?) in a URL. If there is already content after the question mark, then add a forward slash ( / ) after the content and then begin with your UTM tags.

utm_source=companyname
In this case, most email campaigns will probably come from an internal source so you would actually use your own company name here – or you could use ‘internal’. If the email campaign is sent from a third party, then the source should be the third party so you can distinguish between the various sources. This data will show up in all traffic sources compared to Direct, Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. so you’ll want to keep that report as top level as possible. The remaining urchin tracking modules allow you the flexibility to drill down into more specific data sets.

utm_medium=email
The utm_medium identifies the advertising medium that directed the visitors to the site. In the case of an email campaign it makes sense to use ‘email’ as the value for medium. Email will be in the data set compared to organic, cpc, referral, etc. Be consistent here with spelling and case sensitivity – if you use ‘email’ for one campaign, and ‘E-mail’ for the next campaign, two separate data sets will be created.

utm_campaign=productXYZpromotion
Use utm_campaign to identify the name of the campaign. This can vary for email campaigns and it really depends on the frequency and types of email campaigns you send out. You may choose to segment this group by time period because then you can associate the time period with the message you sent. You should determine a hierarchy for this variable before you begin your email campaign tracking and then stay consistent throughout your efforts. The values for this data set will be much more dynamic than the source and medium data sets so it’s important to communicate what the values mean to the rest of your team. Some ideas for segmenting campaigns:

• Product Type – this will allow you to evaluate quality metrics to determine which products your readers are interested in.
• Distribution List – assign identification numbers to specific distribution lists such as geographic regions, vertical markets, sales territories, contact types, etc. This will allow you to associate quality metrics with the various contact types you may have. *Never assign a unique id to an individual email address or person as this is against the user agreement with Google Analytics Terms of Use Policy.

utm_content=creativecopy1
The utm_content tag is usually used to track different versions of ad copy that direct users to the same page. For example, you can analyze which new slogan is more appealing to users by checking the total visits of both versions. You can also compare the popularity of different logos, photos, graphics, etc. Again its important to determine a specific hierarchy so the data makes sense to you and your team.  You can find this data set under the ‘ad content’ dimension in the medium detail report.

utm_term=mediatype1
When writing and email campaign, you’ll want to include as much engaging content as possible and provide a few different methods for directing a reader to your site. For example, you may use text links, photos, videos, buttons, whitepapers, etc. You can use the ‘term’ utm to distinguish these different media types and then compare the quality metrics for each to determine your audience’s preferences. If your analytics report that 75 percent of your visits resulted in readers clicking on a photo then you may want to adjust your messages to always include a photo. As you receive more data you’ll be able to adjust your campaigns based on the trends analytics is providing you.