Google Analytics tracks
photo credit: CLF

Google Analytics, by default uses cookies to recognise traffic sources.  For example, in Google AdWords you may run multiple advert groups, advert campaigns and keywords.  Google Analytics detects this information by passing certain parameters to Google Analytics.

Fact: What people don’t know is that Google Analytics can be configured to measure email campaigns, radio, television and just about any source of website traffic.  Google Analytics is not just made for AdWords - it is an enterprise tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of all traffic sources.

Google Analytics provide a tool which allows you to measure all of the above - and it looks exactly like any other traffic source - except grouped into criteria you wish to report on.

For the purpose of this post - I am going to focus on Google Analytics tracking email campaigns.  I send regular mailings - I want to see if they actually give me any ROI.

In order to pass Google Analytics details of your email campaign - you need to understand the following:

Campaign Source: (referrer: google, citysearch, newsletter4)
Campaign Medium: (marketing medium: cpc, banner, email)
Campaign Term: (identify the paid keywords)
Campaign Content: (use to differentiate ads)
Campaign Name: (product, promo code, or slogan)

The above items are the parameters used by Google Analytics that identify and monitor specific traffic sources.  You pass these parameters via the URL.  If my email were to contain specific links - I would tag these links with the parameters above and Google Analytics would automatically monitor the traffic source.

For the example of a newsletter,  I would use the following:

Campaign Source: February 09 Launch Newsletter
Campaign Medium: Email

In my Google Analytics report - I would then see the above campaign details and I would be able to look at the visitor of these users in isolation from other website traffic using advanced segmentation (I will cover this in another post).  You can build the parameters using the Google Analytics URL Builder Tool.  The result of the above and using the tool would result in:

http://www.tdcreative.net/?utm_source=February%2B09%20Launch%20Newsletter&utm_medium=Email

Obviously - for a TV or radio advert you can’t tell your listeners / watchers to type in all the parameters.  There is another way around it…I will see if anybody can hazard a guess as to how to do this!  Hey…I like setting challenges!