Tracking Email Links with Google Analytics

If you use Google Analytics on your website, and you also send out marketing emails regularly, you may want to use Google Analytics to track your emails. It’s actually simple to do. The trick is to add some parameters in the links in your email. These parameters can be understood by Google Analytics.

For example, if the original link is:

http://www.hdbio.com/kit.php

Then you will replace it as:

http://www.hdbio.com/kit.php?utm_campaign=emarketing&utm_medium=email&utm_source=America

Brief explanation of the parameters:

1. utm_campaign: The name of your campaign. Say “emarketing”.
2. utm_medium: How the message got the to visitor? “email” is good here.
3. utm_source: something about your recipients, say “America”, “Professor”, “Grant” etc

Google provides a tool called “URL Builder” to build the url. Check it out: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

If you feel your url is too long, then you can use a url shortener service such as Google’s URL Shortener or tinyurl. I myself do not do it often.

Now when you go to Google Analytics, click “Traffic Sources”, then “Campaigns”, you will see your campaigns there. You will find how many recipients clicked, which pages they browsed, time spent on your websites etc. Click the following figure to zoom.

Google Analytics Tracking Email (click to zoom)

Lesson Learned

1. You can use Google Analytics to track your email campaigns.
2. Quantitative analysis is a necessary component of marketing.