Do you use Google Analytics for Email marketing? If not, why do you hesitate to use it? Google Analytics is the leading free web analytics tool for professionals and novices. Digital marketers who use email marketing as their top strategy need Google Analytics.
They can use it to measure how successful their email campaigns are. If you need more details on Google Analytics as an email marketing tool, you are in the right place. This article discusses this topic, allowing you to learn how it works with your email service provider.
Why Should You Monitor Email Campaigns?
Monitoring your email campaigns is crucial, as it may reveal whether you are meeting your advertising goals. Tracking with ESP and GA can show whether your campaign is generating leads who are converting into customers.
If you set your email campaign and drop your tools, you will miss crucial data insights about web visitors who hail from this traffic source. On the other hand, consistent monitoring of performance metrics will help you identify aspects of your marketing strategy that require improvement. This will also reveal success areas requiring more monetary support.
Google Analytics for Email Marketing – Types of Metrics it Tracks
Google Analytics is a crucial tool for digital marketers that rely on email marketing. Google Analytics for email marketing allows marketers to study how website visitors interact with various website elements.
Once you install a GA tracking code on your website, it will record every user action or event. When tracking email marketing campaigns, Google Analytics focuses on these metrics:
- Prospects’ bounce rate
- Conversions that occur in real-time
- Clicks arising from links in emails
- Customers’ click-through rates.
Do you need more reasons to use Google Analytics for Email Marketing? Here are they are:
- Cost – Google Analytics is an attractive analytics tool because it is free. This means you can allocate your money to email marketing efforts.
- Accurate Data Insights – GA displays email campaign data in real-time. That allows you to read up-to-date reports, offering you accurate data for decision-making.
- Versatility – Google Analytics for email marketing can report on most of the metrics that email service providers have. This can help you notice the content areas that spark action from prospective subscribers. GA can estimate the interval between sending an email and a subscriber opening it. This can help you reestablish your sending frequency.
- Continuous Tracking – Google Analytics for email marketing sets itself apart by tracking user behavior throughout. Once a user clicks a link within an email to reach your website, Google Analytics will peep to see their next move. If you analyze GA data, you can follow a subscriber’s steps from when they read an email to when they got to your site. GA will reveal the pages they viewed before converting or bouncing. It can show you the specific content that inspires potential subscribers to click and act.
- Demographic Segmentation– Google Analytics offers an audience segmentation feature that can help you separate your site visitors based on traffic source. In this case, you can have it show you visitors who saw your website via your email campaigns. By assessing the number of subscribers you get from an email campaign, you can review the effectiveness of your methods. Moreover, you can compare your email audience segment with other segments. If its impact is bigger, you can put more effort into it.
- Super Reporting – Google Analytics for email marketing is a powerful reporting tool. With its in-depth data insights, GA generates the most accurate reports. You can read them to improve the user experience for site visitors.
Email Service Provider Metrics
If you use Google Analytics for email marketing, it will complement the marketing tools your email service provider provides. ESPs provide built-in analytics tools that help augment email marking campaigns. Google Analytics alone will not do some of the activities that ESP’s tools do.
Likewise, ESP tools cannot do all GA’s tracking activities. ESP tools track metrics like email frequency and open rates. By tracking email open rates, you can gauge how well your subject lines are working. Moreover, you can determine the best time of day to send emails to target audiences and the most appropriate email-sending frequency.
Above all, you can see the email types your subscribers love to read. ESP cannot track how email subscribers behave when they reach your website. Its primary role is to send subscribers to your website. Once they arrive, it does not know what they do next. This is where Google Analytics for email marketing comes in.
Using Google Analytics with ESP Tools to Boost Your Email Campaigns
Using Google Analytics for email marketing is easy if you understand the steps. Here are the things to do:
1. Google Analytics Account
The first thing you require is a GA account, which you can open at Google.com/analytics/. Ensure you stipulate a property name. It will represent the email you want to track with GA. Choose your Industry when the system prompts you to get access to goals and other options later.
2. Create your Goals
The next thing to use Google Analytics for email marketing is to set goals. Perhaps you want customers to place orders or fill out and submit a contact form. Your goals will depend on the type of property you have.
Some of you have an ecommerce store and others have a mobile gaming app. Google Analytics provides three ways to set up goals. These include goal templates, custom goals, and smart goals. Sign into your Google Analytics account, hit Admin, and move to the “View” column. Click on “Goals” to make your first objective.
3. Design Your Campaign
How to use Google Analytics for email marketing- 10 can be difficult and tedious for novice GA users. First, connect your website to GA. This work requires you to have basic HTML coding and Javascript knowledge.
If you do not have this basic technical knowledge, consider hiring a freelancer web developer to help you. Alternatively, read Google’s instructions on attaching the GA snippet to your site.
Not every email service provider supports automatic link formatting.
If your ESP does not offer this support, consider formatting your links before you can track them in your email campaigns. Google provides a free URL builder to help you format your URL links and make them trackable.
These URLs have the same Urchin Tracking Module tags at the end. They are the best for when you want to direct web traffic to your website from an external source. In email marketing, therefore, your trackable URLs will identify the email messages that produce traffic. Here are simple steps to do:
- Visit this Google URL builder
- Navigate to the Website URL box and paste your URL.
- Move to the Campaign Source area and enter your ESP name.
- Under Campaign Medium, Choose the “Email” option.
- Enter the date you sent your campaign in the Campaign Name section.
- Now hit “Generate URL” to see your formatted link.
If your ESP allows automated link tracking, you can set them up directly in their system. It will save you from doing the manual formatting work shown above. The last step in this section involves campaign segmentation in your Google Analytics for email marketing.
4. Interpret Your Reports
After setting up your email campaign, Google Analytics for email marketing will do its job. So, log in to your Google Analytics dashboard to view the reports. While there, hit “Acquisition” and then choose “Campaigns.” GA provides reports that most people can interpret even though it uses complex data.
You only need to read charts and graphs to determine how well your email campaign is doing. A real-time report will reveal the number of people who visited your website from a given email campaign. It will also show you where they came from and which web pages they saw.
A campaign report is the most relevant in this context. It normally shows the number of web pages users who came to your site from an email campaign saw and how long they were there. Lastly, you can view a behavior flow report as it will disclose the actual user’s route from clicking a link in your email campaign to visiting various pages of your website.
Understanding Bounce and Click-through Rates
When you start using Google Analytics for email marketing, you will encounter two results. These are the bounce rate and click-through rate. Ensure you understand the meaning of these to know how to improve your email marketing results. If GA shows a high bounce rate, it may indicate that your target subscribers do not find your email content engaging.
In that case, you should improve your subject lines to ensure target recipients read and like them. Additionally, you can use Google Analytics for email marketing to determine if your email timing is poor. If you reduce the high bounce rates, you will make your campaigns more successful. A low bounce rate indicates your target recipients like your subject lines and email sending frequency.
If your click-through rate is low, it may indicate that customers lost interest in your email after opening it and decided to abandon it. A high click-through rate shows that your content can compel prospects to visit your website after opening emails.
Final Say
Tracking an email campaign performance is the most effective way to know if you are achieving your marketing goals. Depending on your email service provider’s marketing tools alone to track performance could make you miss some metrics. That is why you need Google Analytics for marketing. The tool does what most typical analytics tools do not. Its reports can help you make better email marketing decisions and strategies.
