Email Marketing Tip #12: Integrate with Google Analytics
EMAIL MARKETING TIP #12
Integrate your website with Google Analytics. This tool enhances your email software’s ability to measure your campaign’s ROI by generating comprehensive reports illustrating your campaign’s impact on your website activity and organizational bottom-line. Google Analytics measures page views, landing pages, exit pages, funnel paths, and conversions.
HOW TO INTEGRATE GOOGLE ANALYTICS CAMPAIGN DATA INTO EMAIL LISTS
We’re huge fans and advocates of using Google Analytics for your website as part of understanding your digital marketing and email marketing ROI. Most of the time, we use Google Analytics to track what happens after you use email to send customers back to your website. But what if we could use Google Analytics’ tracking codes a little earlier in the process and segment your list with them?
It turns out, this is not only possible, but relatively straightforward. If you have developers or an IT department to help you with some of the coding, please share this post with them.
Google Analytics passes 3 snippets of text along using its URL builder: source, medium, and campaign. When you’re creating trackable URLs for marketing campaigns (via any channel), you assign values to these. For example, if we advertised in the NY Times online edition, we’d specify the source as NY Times, the medium as Advertising, and the campaign would likely be the date the ad ran. Here’s another example, using Facebook ads:
This is an important step to take for any campaign where you want to generate trackable URLs that will show up in Google Analytics, and many of you already do this.
The next step is to add these three custom fields to your mailing list. You can do this in the WhatCounts Publicaster or Professional editions with ease by adding fields to your list, as shown below:
The third step, and the part that you may need to have your developers help you with, is to copy Google Analytics’ fields into your subscription forms. Use the programming language of your choice to grab the tracking codes from your website’s URLs and assign them to your mailing list’s fields. Here’s an example using the PHP language:
Update your subscription forms using this code (it’s invisible to the subscriber). Congratulations! You’re now collecting Google Analytics data in your mailing list. So what can you do with that information? Segment your list and send highly targeted email, of course!
You can and should send separate email campaigns to people who come in via PPC or social media, or track the action rate of different audiences. Any segmentation, tracking, or reporting that you’d do on a piece of custom data, you can do with your newly-tracked Google Analytics data.
I emphasize that this works with both the Publicaster and Professional Editions of the WhatCounts platform; I used Publicaster in this instance since my mailing list runs on it. If you need help implementing this advanced tracking method, please contact our Strategic Services team today. If you’re not a WhatCounts customer, consider contacting us now!
Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts
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