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News, tips and all things Campaign Monitor

New feature: Automatically add Google Analytics tracking to your email campaigns

Posted by Mathew Patterson on April 3, 2008

Campaign Monitor has always been well known for its great reporting features, because they make it so easy for you and your clients to see very quickly the results of your email campaigns.

Today we released another new feature based on a lot of your suggestions and requests that can help extend that email campaign reporting right into your website. All you need to get started is a free Google Analytics account and a few moments in Campaign Monitor.

If you aren't already aware, Google Analytics is software for tracking your visitors as they move around your site. By placing a small piece of code on each page, you can see great reports about the number of visitors, where they came from, what they did and how long they stayed. With a little extra work you can even track conversions and sales data so you can see exactly how you're generating customers and revenue.

With our new integration feature, you can follow your visitors all the way from your email newsletter into your site, and hopefully right through to 'conversion' - an ecommerce sale, a consulting enquiry or whatever other action you might want to measure. Best of all, it is super easy to setup.

Getting started with Campaign Monitor and Google Analytics

We'll assume that you've already got your Analytics code working on your website (or your client's site), tracking away on that end. Setting it up on Campaign Monitor is a snap.

To get started, jump into your 'Manage Clients' tab, and pick the appropriate client, and click the blue 'Edit client' link to access the Google Analytics setting. Here's a complete walkthrough of the process if you need help.

Now whenever you send a campaign for that client, Campaign Monitor will automatically add Google Analytics tags to each link to the domains you selected. During the campaign setup process, you can enter a useful title (the campaign name by default) and source name to help you find that campaign in Google Analytics later.

Tagging a campaign for Google Analytics

What can Google Analytics do for me?

Some pretty cool stuff! Being able to connect the data from your email campaign with the same people's data on your site gives you some great insight into how your campaigns convert into web site traffic, customer conversions and even sales.

Here are a few quick examples that show you the power of integrating with Google Analytics. For a complete walkthrough on how to access these reports in your analytics account, check out our complete guide.

See exactly how much revenue your campaign generated

As well as the total revenue generated, you can also see exactly how many transactions your campaign generated, the average value of each subscriber and the percentage of subscribers that converted into a sale. Learn more about tracking revenue with Google Analytics.

Screenshot of E-commerce report in Google Analytics

Track how many subscribers converted

By setting up conversion goals in Google Analytics, you can see how many subscribers completed a desired action, such as completed an enquiry form or adding a product to their shopping cart.

Screenshot of goals report in Google Analytics

See what each individual recipients did on your site

Interesting in knowing what a specific subscriber got up to once they went to your site? You can easily see how many pages they checked out, what goals they completed and how much they spent. You can also easily export this data and re-import it back into your account for incredibly targeted follow up campaigns.

Screenshot of subscriber report in Google Analytics

This new feature is live in your account now, so if you're already using Google Analytics for yourself or your clients, you can access these reports in a snap. We'll be putting together a series of posts here moving forward to show you how to get the most out of this feature and hopefully some interesting case studies on how some of you are using it to improve the effectiveness and return on investment for your email campaigns.

11 comments so far

Weblike

wrote on April 4, 2008 1:47 AM

How can i track e-mail-adresses?

Dana

wrote on April 4, 2008 2:59 AM

I'm going to be annoying but... MailBuild! MailBuild! MailBuild! I don't have any clients who use Google Analytics and Campaign Monitor, but almost all my clients on MailBuild already have it set up.

Dave Greiner

wrote on April 4, 2008 8:09 AM

Dana, fear not, this functionality will be coming to MailBuild soon, along with many of the other cool features we've launched for Campaign Monitor lately.

Weblike, we explain a little more about how to drill down to the subscriber level and see what individuals did in our help system.

Damien

wrote on April 4, 2008 2:04 PM

I know I've said it already here once this week but wow… Are you guys all taking guarana or something down there? I second Dana's Mailbuild call - we've moved almost all of our clients to MB these days too.

Jon Moss

wrote on April 4, 2008 7:28 PM

I was just about to say Mailbuild!!!!!! Excellent news that it is coming soon :)

Any idea of timescales?

PS Can you add a subscribe to comments box to tick please on this 'ere blog!? TA!

pierre

wrote on April 4, 2008 8:03 PM

thanks for your work, CM team, it's great

Tim Anderson-Bonsor

wrote on April 7, 2008 3:53 PM

Amazing stuff. Can't wait to use this over at MB. Thanks guys.

Anna

wrote on April 8, 2008 4:00 AM

Great post- I've seen the "campaign" stuff on Google Analytics but wondered how it all hooked up together. Thanks for the great screenshots too!

Bbig

wrote on April 9, 2008 1:10 PM

One Word! AWESOME! Many ESPs have relationships with the large Analytics firms, but few have taken the time to integrate GA into their products 'out of the box!' This feature is great, and why I will continue to recommend Campaign Monitor to some of my web development colleagues.

Because your pricing structure is so straight forward and Google Analytics is free, your users (e-Marketing Consultants/Designers/Marketing Managers/etc.) should face fewer obstacles to getting their clients/colleagues to integrate the tools! This is a very powerful combination. GREAT JOB!! KEEP IT UP!

Winston

wrote on April 12, 2008 12:28 AM

It's great to see you guys embracing 3rd party analytics... and there's a lot more out there beyond Google Analytics. GA data, for instance, is always a day behind. While you can see how many pages a user went to, you can't see the path, at least not easily. We are working on an integration with Clickening for realtime individual visitor tracking, because it's so cool to watch visitors 1 by 1 as they land on the site in realtime right when the campaign is mailed out.

Grant Cox

wrote on April 30, 2008 11:52 AM

This is a great feature, however identifying individual recipients as shown in your last example is against the Google Analytics Terms of Service ( http://www.google.com/analytics/tos.html ). Point 7 describes that Google Analytics cannot be used to track any "Personally Identifying Information", which an email address certainly is.

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