Using Google Analytics to Measure the Results of Your Email Marketing

By Jason Hawkins on October 16, 2015

Email marketing is something that can sometimes fall by the wayside when considering all of the outlets for online marketing. However, email marketing is definitely something you should still be investing time and effort into, but here are a lot of different strategies and approaches. So how do you know if your email marketing is actually working? Google Analytics helps.

One way to get started with tracking the results and overall outcome of your email marketing is to use Google Analytics to measure your results. You definitely want to start by getting a sense of how to use and interpret specific dashboards for email marketing, and from there get a better understanding of what you are looking at as a whole so that you know what different measures are telling you in the first place.

Getting Started: A quick rundown for beginners

 

Many people don’t know that you can track email marketing with Google Analytics in the first place. This is obviously a problem that needs to get cleared up. It is definitely possible to analyze the impact of your email marketing, but you need to know where to start.

Step 1: Set up Campaign Tracking in Google Analytics.

For those of you who don’t already know, Google Analytics can be used to track where visitors are coming from before landing on your site. Some examples include social media (like Facebook or Twitter) and in the case of this article, emails clients have directly received from your brand. The tricky thing with email is that unless you do some reconfiguring, all of the clicks on your website from your email campaign will just show up as direct.

Thus, what you need to do is set up UTM variables. UTM variables come from links within emails that you send out in your email campaign, which basically lets Google Analytics know where exactly the traffic is coming from.

tracking email marketing campaign with Google analytics

As you see in the screen shot above from Campaign Monitor, the UTM variables basically fix to the end of your link, and you are able to set them up yourself.

Step 2: Tagging Your Links

As I just mentioned, setting up UTM variables is a lot easier than you think because of Google Analytic’s URL builder. Ultimately, this free tool allows you to build your own links that will end up being placed directly into your email marketing campaign.

URL builder - Google analytics

The screenshot above is an example of how you create your own links to put into your marketing campaign. You simply visit the tool and fill out the form and you’re done. This Google Analytics tool makes it really easy, you just need to decide how you want to label and organize various email campaigns, so that when it comes time to analyze marketing results, you know what you’re seeing.

Of course, if you are in need of some help with your email marketing campaign, and don’t want to be doing all of this manually, you should visit our website to learn about the services we offer at the Miami SEO company for email marketing.

Step 3: The Power of Advanced Segments

Before you can utilize the features in Google Analytics fully, you need to create advance segments for your various marketing campaigns. You can think of advanced segments like filters, which further organize your data before analysis. To get started with creating an advanced segment, you will need to click on the Add Segment box above any of your standard reports, which you can see below:

Google Analytics example of email marketing

An extra word of advice: when you are adding an advanced segment for Email marketing in Google Analytics, you should set the medium to “Email”. After you have done this step you will see the numbers of people who have arrived on your site through an email marketing campaign along side of your metrics.

Analyzing the Results of Your Email Campaign

Part one of this article covered how to set up links and advanced segments, and offered some beginners advice for using Google Analytics with your email marketing campaign. Now is the time to discuss some of the different reports that you can run once you are set up. This is not an exhaustive list, but definitely some of the things to consider once you have your campaign set-up and running.

The Dashboard Basics

Once you are signed up for analytics and have added the necessary links I described above, you can learn a lot about your email marketing audience.  Once you have your dashboard set and ready to go, there are a few things that you should keep an eye on:

  • Revenue by source
  • Visits by browser
  • E-Commerce transactions (sorted by product, specifically)
  • The region/location users are coming from
  • The type of device site visitors are using
  • Visits and revenue by email marketing campaign

These kind of analyses allow you to see how you can improve your current strategy and make adjustments when things are not working the what that you want them to or expected.

Two Other Reports to Run

In my opinion, there are two reports that are really important to run in Google Analytics with email marketing. The first allows you to see how your email marketing campaigns compare with one another, and the second allows you to see how your email marketing compares with other online marketing efforts that you are making.

  • Compare Your Campaigns: The Campaign Report

If you are wondering how your campaigns compare against each other, look no further than the campaign report. This particular report will allow you to see all of your different campaigns against each other—show how many visits, which are called “Sessions”, and visitors, which are called “Users” are coming to your site from different campaigns. If you are an e-commerce site, you can also utilize this tool to look at revenue and sales coming from different campaigns.

 (2) How are your email campaigns really working? The Overview Report

If you are curious about how your email campaigns are working compared to all of your other marketing efforts, then you definitely want to take a look at the Overview Report. Similar to the report we discussed last, you will be able to see how many visits (Sessions) and visitors (Users) arrived to your site because of an email campaign, in comparison to other online marketing efforts. In this report, you will also be able to see the number of pages per visit and the bounce rate.

The Takeaway

It is hard to believe that people aren’t using Google Analytics to their full advantage when it comes to email marketing, so if you haven’t already, set up your email marketing campaigns with Google Analytics right away so that you can actually measure your results and see how you are doing (especially between email marketing campaigns and other online social marketing efforts you are making). You want to know what is driving people to your site so you can increase traffic and constantly be improving on your efforts.

Do you have any questions or comments? Let us know what is or is not working for you in the comment section below.



About The Author

Jason Hawkins
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com

Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.