maine web development, web design, internet marketing

In my last post on Campaign Tagging, I walked you through the basics of setting up tagged links that work in conjunction with Google Analytics and Email Marketing. While campaign tagging is not a new feature within Google Analytics, it’s still a powerful tool to keep in your Inbound Marketing tool belt.

So let’s jump right into it! You’ve created a newsletter; used the URL Builder to generate your tagged links and have successfully delivered your newsletter. In order to see the results of your newsletters performance, you’ll need to log into Google Analytics: view Reports → Traffic Sources and then Campaigns. Once you’re in the Campaign dashboard, look for the specific campaign that you referenced when you were generating the links, i.e. Dec-2009-Week-Two

Once you click on your campaign name, you’ll have the ability to review different reports like landing pages, regions, new vs. returning visitors and more. We’ll be focusing on Ad Content today.

Ad Content or Campaign Content is one of the optional values that you can set when generating your tagged links (fig. 1).You will use this option to differentiate between ads within your newsletter. In other words, if you have three separate links that have the same landing page, this is where you would distinguish which link sent the most visitors to your site.

fig. 1

I used the example “Button” above to show that this link will be associated with a graphical button that will be used in a newsletter. If there was a text link as well, you would then change Campaign Content to “Link” and regenerate the URL. See example below.

fig. 2

The benefit of using Ad / Campaign Content is that when reviewing analytics, you’ll be able to view this report and see whether or not your graphical button had more impact than the textual link. With this data, you can gauge what kind of user conversion works best with your target audience. As you can see in the example above, the graphical button had far more success than the textual link for this particular campaign.

Although reporting and link performance is available in most Email Service Provider platforms, connecting your campaigns with Google Analytics gives you far more power. You can track and analyze your visitors behaviors AFTER arriving to your site via your email campaign and not just what link they click on within their Inbox.

Photo Credit: Wendy Copley

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves Kasi and Amanda will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Email Marketing is still so important

2009 has been the year Social Media just seemed to take over. We all love new toys and seeing how they work. Please don’t think that makes your old favorite toys any less useful (Velveteen Rabbit anyone?).

Every social networking site is tied to an email address. For many of those sites, a new update or subscriber on a site generates an email alert reminding you to go back and see the most recent activity. Our businesses are run with emails. Sales leads are usually forms filled out on your site, which generate an email. Everything we do online is held together with email.

Our friend Greg Cangialosi, CEO of Blue Sky Factory calls email the “Digital Glue.” Email is the driver of all things we tend to do in business. It is the staple of all online marketing. When you are building a gingerbread house you essentially have some cookie planks and cool colored candy. The frosting is what holds the whole thing together! Don’t overlook how important email is because it is the one piece that hold all of your online marketing together.

Want some more from Greg?
Check out this video too on merging your email marketing with social media:

Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar

• Dec. 4 – Is Google Caffeine on Your Holiday Wish List?
• Dec. 3 – Don’t Forget to Make Your Title Tags and Check ‘Em Twice
  
• Dec. 2 – Your Mobile Website
• Dec. 1 – Your Holiday Card List (Your Network)

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Campaign Tagging is a great way to track results of your your Email Marketing efforts within Google Analytics. By tagging your links, you gain a broader, more full picture of what people do on your site after they “clickthrough” a link in an email.

What are tagged links?

Tagged links are the links within your newsletter that have been assigned a unique “tag” that will register within your Google Analytics account. There are three required (*) unique parameters that you modify for each link within the email campaign, and two optional parameters that you can use to further filter the reports.

They are:

1. Campaign Name*
2. Campaign Source*
3. Campaign Medium*
4. Campaign Term
5. Campaign Content

* Required

The Campaign Name is the name of the email marketing campaign. This should be unique for every email that you deliver so that you can later review and compare the analytics data.

The Campaign Source identifies who distributed your email newsletter. You can use the name of your email newsletter or the name of the provider, depending on how complex your email marketing efforts are.

The Campaign Medium is simply ‘email.’

The Campaign Term can be used if you are targeting certain terms – if your Campaign Medium is PPC, for example.

The Campaign Content can be used to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.

So now that you have the basic understanding of what Campaign Tags are, here’s how to use them. Google has a URL Builder that generates the Campaign Tags for you. You then use these tags in place of the original URL’s within your email.

Example:

Say I wanted to link back to our home page from within a newsletter.  I would use the URL http://www.hallme.com/. In order to integrate this URL within analytics, we would use the URL Builder to generate the new link.

We’ll use “Campaign Tagging” as the Campaign Name, “Hall” as the Campaign Source and “Email” as the Campaign Medium.

This is how the new link appears:
http://www.hallme.com/?utm_source=HALL&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Campaign%2BTagging

Once this link has been added to the newsletter and delivered to an inbox, if it is clicked, it triggers a page view in Google Analytics and shows the referring source as HALL (the name of the campaign we selected).

This is important for a number of reasons. Without tagging your links, you may see a spike in visitors coming to your site after delivering a newsletter. But how do you distinguish which of those visitors are a result of your newsletter? You don’t.

Also, analytics treats links from within a newsletter as Direct Traffic. Direct Traffic is the number of times visitors came to your site using a link they have either saved in their favorites, bookmarks or from within a newsletter. Campaign Tagging is essentially segmenting this data so that you can better understand the performance of your newsletters.

In order to access this data from with Google Analytics, log into your account.

View Reports

View Traffic Sources

View Campaigns

View Dimensions

So now that you have the basics for integrating your email marketing campaigns with your analytics accounts, you’ll better understand the behaviors of your target audience and see actual data generated from your newsletters reflected within your website analytics.

I’ve seen it so many times, (well technically I didn’t “see” anything at all): a newsletter arrives in my inbox, and, since I don’t load HTML images automatically, all I is see is blank space or maybe a couple big red “X’s”… I know who the newsletter is from but without loading any of the images I have no idea what their offer is.

There are a lot of savvy people out there who like to take the wheel and direct their own Email Marketing initiatives. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you don’t take the necessary steps you’re probably just wasting your time.

Here are three important steps one should consider when drafting up a newsletter:

1. Never use an image to deliver all your content: if your whole offer is drafted as an image and your recipient does not allow HTML emails, well you’re out of luck. The best advise is to “recreate” your image using an HTML editor so that any and all text elements render as text. (see fig. 1)
2. If images are necessary use ALT Tags: make sure you utilize ALT tags and don’t describe the image, describe the content you are promoting. If your images don’t display in your recipient’s inbox, they still see or “read” the content that was intended for them. (see fig. 2)
3. Test your newsletters in different email accounts: If you’re not testing your newsletters in different email accounts, i.e. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, then as stated above, you’re out of luck. There are so many elements within a newsletter that look perfect when you’re drafting it but not so perfect when viewed in different accounts. The solution? Test test test…

Fig. 1

This is an example of an image only newsletter with NO ALT Text:

Fig. 2

Although this is an image only newsletter, the designers used ALT text in a very creative way.

Describing their offers so that you still get the details without loading any of the images:

If you absolutely have to take the wheel and create your own newsletters, following these simple steps will definitely give you a good start in the right direction.

For more helpful hints, or to talk about how Hall can help with your Email Marketing initiatives, leave a comment or contact me directly!