The health of your business depends on the effectiveness of your email campaign. Keeping track of how users are responding to your emails is just as important, if not more so.
Calculating ROI, click-through rates, and opens are enough to make your head spin, but slogging through numbers is another matter. There’s always a chance that once you’ve done that, your campaign won’t perform as you had hoped, despite taking the time to craft your email content with your audience and goal in mind.
Keeping track of so many metrics makes it difficult to pinpoint what’s wrong. That’s where Google Analytics comes in.
The Importance of Email Tracking Analytics
How effective is your email marketing campaign?
- Are you reaching out to new customers?
- Are there any open rates for meetings?
- Lead generation?
- What is driving conversions?
As email campaigns have a four-fold return on investment compared to other marketing methods, it is imperative that you track your analytics (source).
Our team understands how challenging it can be to obtain, interpret, and transform raw data into something usable. Thanks to Google Analytics, tracking and viewing your email marketing statistics has never been easier. Your campaign can then be measured based on its effectiveness.
You can gain a deeper understanding of what is wrong with your campaign by tracking open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates. In order to deliver relevant and interesting content to your audience each time, you can take concrete steps to adjust your content to their behavior.
Using Google Analytics to Optimize Your Website
In addition to being free, Google Analytics offers a wealth of features that can assist you in improving your business.
Besides tracking clicks and opens, it also allows you to follow the user’s journey beyond your email as they navigate your website. Here are a few of our favorite things you can do with Google Analytics.
1. Your visitors can be segmented
There is an Advanced Analytics section in Google Analytics that allows you to break down your audience traffic according to a wide range of characteristics and see from where they are coming. This feature allows you to focus on a specific segment of your audience and gain insight into how to better engage them.
2. Keep track of activity beyond emails
An open rate and click-through rate are important, but what happens once a visitor reaches your website is equally important. You cannot stop Google Analytics from tracking your visitors once they leave your email and enter your website – it follows them throughout their visit.
It may be helpful to gain insight into how your visitors interact with different pages on your website in order to determine which types of content are resonating with them. By refining and improving your message, you will be able to reach your intended audience.
3. Keep track of email opens and link clicks
By viewing where people are opening your emails using Google Analytics, you can determine where your most active audience is located around the world. Using this information, you can plan the timing of your email campaigns to coincide with the times when your subscribers are most active and most likely to read your emails.
It is also possible to see how quickly people open your emails after they have been sent, and then compare this number with previous emails. Meanwhile, link clicks provide insight into which content resonates most with your readers.
4. With advanced reporting, you can keep track of your progress
Google’s reports are easy to understand, even though the word “report” does not exactly inspire excitement. There are many visual representations of your data, such as charts and graphs, so you do not need to worry about calculating or calculating percentages.
You can make better use of your data if it is more specific. With Google Analytics, you can obtain information such as how many visitors are coming to your site as a result of a particular email campaign and how long they remain on your site after reading your email.
As a result of this powerful form of data, you are able to get right down to the nitty-gritty of what your audience wants from your content.
What is even better is that Google collects real-time data to provide you with an accurate picture of your metrics at all times. If you wish to view your performance at any time, whether on a monthly or daily basis, you can be assured that you are seeing accurate results.
Google Analytics: How to Optimize Your Marketing Campaigns
Now that you are aware of the importance of tracking your metrics, let’s take a look at how you can make the most of Google Analytics.
1. Choose the tracking options you want for your campaign
To keep track of your email sends, we recommend using campaign tags. It is true that Google automatically tracks organic traffic from social media and other platforms, however, we recommend setting up custom campaign tags so you can get a better understanding of what content is driving the most traffic to your site.
2. Create a Google Analytics account
Thankfully, this part is straightforward. Set up a property on your Analytics account by visiting google.com/analytics and logging into your account (or creating one if you do not already have one).
The property represents the website, app, or in this case email, that you wish to track. When a property has been designated, you can set up a reporting view, add a tracking code to your emails, and begin collecting all the data you desire.
Conclusion
This tag is useful for emails with multiple calls to action; it shows you which CTA drives more traffic. You can use the content tag to differentiate types of links in your emails (such as text vs. image links), so you can run A/B tests with ease.
It’s not enough to rely on your instincts when it comes to tracking the success of an email marketing campaign. You can refine your strategy as you go with tools like Google Analytics and NeverBounce, which help you track your progress.
