If you’re in marketing or sales, you have probably managed a lot of email marketing campaigns. And you’ve also likely viewed your Google Analytics data many times. But do you know how to make the most of the data from your campaigns and Google Analytics? Do you know how to compare data from your email campaigns with Google Analytics? Google Analytics can give you data that you won’t see in your email marketing campaign managers (MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, etc.). With that said, your email marketing campaign manager does have a lot of great data. Most give you the following information on each individual campaign:
- Sent emails
- Successful deliveries
- Undelivered emails
- Total opens
- Open rate
- Last opened
- Forwarded emails
- Clicks per unique opens
- Total clicks
- Last clicked
- Abuse reports
- Unsubscribes
- How many users made a purchase in your online store through an email campaign?
- What percentage of your entire site income is email generating?
- Do you understand how your visitors become customers? Is your email campaign integrated into that journey?
1) Tag your email campaigns in Google Analytics
If you don’t tag your email campaigns properly, you won’t get anywhere. To tag your campaigns, either your email marketing tool needs to be connected/integrated with Google Analytics (via a plugin or an add on), or you need to tag all the URLs of your emails by hand. (If you don’t know what UTM tags are, please visit this complete guide to UTM tracking for Google Analytics.)Integrating Google Analytics
Let’s talk about the first option: integrating Google Analytics and your email marketing manager. We’ll use MailChimp as an example. MailChimp makes it very easy to connect campaigns with Google Analytics. If you use MailChimp, check out these premium responsive email templates. To integrate Google Analytics and MailChimp, you must first sync your MailChimp and Google Analytics accounts. The Integrations section in MailChimp is in Account > Integrations. Find “Google: Analytics, Contacts and Docs” and then click Connect. Be patient. It may take 24-48 hours for data to come in. After that, set up analytics tracking by filling in the field “Google Analytics link tracking” in the campaign’s Setup screen. Note: If you use this method, don’t forget to activate Google Analytics tracking and define the Campaign name for every single campaign.Tagging URLs by hand
If you prefer to have more control over the entire process, the best way is to create the URLs manually. You can create the URLs using this form, but we strongly recommend the McGaw.io UTM tool (a really useful Chrome addon). In the URL structure, you should include:- Website URL (in our example, “targetdomain.com”)
- Campaign Source (in our example, “yourdomain-newsletter”)
- Campaign Medium (in our example, “email”)
- Campaign Name (in our example, “blackfriday”)
- Campaign Term
- Campaign Content
2) Define your goals
After you have a system in place for tagging your URLs, you must define the goal that you want to measure. Do you want to know when your customers visit a URL? Complete a transaction? Request information? Fill in a form? Though every business is different, we are going to work through an example involving an online shop. The goals of this shop are to- Sell.
- Sell.
- Sell.
- And sell.
3) Understand the data behind your email campaigns
Let’s continue looking at our example of an online shop. The goal is to sell items, so when comparing campaigns, one of the most important things to know is, which campaign sold more?Comparing Campaigns
As you can see on the right side of the screenshot, the first campaign resulted in the most transactions. You can alternatively sort the campaigns by transactions instead of sessions (which is the default). Studying this report, you might wonder about another interesting question: what is the relationship between sessions and transactions? In other words, what campaign best converts your visitors into customers? You can answer this by monitoring the “E-commerce Conversion Rate” metric in the same report. As a result of the second campaign, more than 2 visitors out of every 100 made a purchase.Best sellers from emails
All this data is extremely useful, but still very basic. We can also look at what products are best sold from emails. Best sellers can be found in this report: Conversions > E-commerce > Product performance.Filtered data from email campaigns
Now that we have this information, it is important to know how to filter data from email marketing actions or even from each email campaign. If you have tagged your campaigns properly, all this information is at your fingertips. The previous report gave us data on all orders, but what if we want to filter for email sales? Filtering correctly requires a consistent tagging structure that can help us to dig into the data. We recommend tagging using this structure:- URL for email number 1: targetdomain.com/?utm_source=yourdomain-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=blackfriday
- URL for email number 2: targetdomain.com/?utm_source=yourdomain-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pre-christmas
- URL for email number 3: targetdomain.com/?utm_source=yourdomain-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pre-blackfriday
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