Why Google Analytics is Important in Email Marketing
Google Analytics is a web analytics solution that gives you insight to your website traffic and your marketing’s effectiveness. It allows you to analyze your traffic data in order to strengthen your marketing initiatives and ultimately make more sales. Chances are if you’re a business with a website, you’re already using Google Analytics. But did you know you can also utilize this program within your email marketing campaigns? Read below to learn why Google Analytics is more important than you think.
Why Should You Use Google Analytics?
Using Google Analytics, e-mail marketers can gain greater control over the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of each outreach campaign by sending carefully targeted and relevant messages.
- Design messages to your audience’s preferences
- Minimize steps in the purchase process
- Improve landing page effectiveness
- Keep visitors on your website longer by identifying & optimizing the weak links where most people exit
- Tracking your email campaigns as a traffic source to your website
- Determining which products grab your customers’ attention
- Sending follow-up emails to target customers
- Boosting conversion rates by tweaking your marketing process
- Comparing eNewsletter’s performance to other advertising efforts.
Plus it’s free. How to Use Google Analytics in Your Email CampaignsBy using Google Analytics tags, you can monitor who is visiting your site because of your email campaign and what they did once they got there.
Before you can create these tags, you first need to create a Google Analytics account by visiting http://www.google.com/analytics. Follow the directions provided to place a tracking code onto the relevant website files and then add parameters to URLs in each. You need to tag EVERY link in your email newsletter. Google Analytics will help you with tagging your links through their URL Builder, which will generate a URL so you don’t have to understand the complexities of link syntax. You will then copy and paste this link into your email campaign where the link would normally go.You should note the following campaign variables for tracking: source (email newsletter), the campaign (the subject of your eNewsletter), the link’s text and the URL linked to.Once an email campaign is properly coded and delivered, Google Analytics automatically monitors resulting website traffic, telling you which links were most popular with your recipients, when they visited your site, how long they stayed and where they navigated following arrival.You can now adjust your campaign variables to improve results over time with all the data you have compiled with Google Analytics.Which Email Services Integrate with Google Analytics?Many email marketing services can be set up to help you code your email newsletters for Google Analytics, such as MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Vertical Response, and AWeber.