In this post, I’ll share how I learned to track an email campaign via Google Analytics.

First up, what do I mean by email campaign?

let’s say you email 1000 newsletter subscribers a link (URL) along w/ a summary – How do you track the traffic that is generated via this email campaign? Well – that’s where Google analytics can help you track your email campaigns. One metric would be how may people clicked on that link and visited your site.

Why should I care?

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” – Peter Drucker

If you do not measure what’s working or what’s not working, then you can’t improve – can you? Let’s take a hypothetical example. supposing it’s cost you $25 dollars to email 1000 people. How do you calculate the ROI on it? Well – track it! And the tool you can consider using is Google Analytics.

Now, Here are the steps to track an email campaign via Google Analytics:

Here’s the visual:

Here are the steps:

1. First Step is to create an URL.

Why do you need this? Basically this URL would have “meta data” that helps Google Analytics identify this link belongs to one of the campaigns.

How do we create it? Use this web service: http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1033867 to create an URL:

This is how an URL that I created looks: http://parasdoshiblog.blogspot.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=UTDEmailCampaign

2. Create an advanced segment in Google Analytics:

> Open Google Analytics.

> Select your site

> you should be in the audience overview report

> From here, click on advanced segment and click on new custom segment

> Here I’ve configured it like shown in the image below. Note the name of the campaign is same as the name of the campaign in STEP 1.

> Save segment

> next time you visit, you’ll see this custom segment – select it and you’ll see only from the campaign that you want to track:

That’s about it for this post. your comments are very welcome!

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