Tracking an Email Campaign in Google Analytics

by Anna Lewis on 12th July 2011

When looking at the Traffic Report in Google Analytics once an email campaign has been sent it can be hard to get a good understanding of how much traffic came to the site and how these visitors interacted and converted.

Unfortunately, Google can’t track this automatically for you as there are so many email providers but luckily it’s nice and easy to implement tracking yourself so that you can see exactly how many visits were generated from each email campaign and how these visitors interacted with your site.

What you need to do is add a string of tracking code to each link to your website within your email, but don’t worry, this code is used in the link reference rather than being visible to the users. To generate the tracking code use this Campaign URL Builder from Google.

Firstly, enter the URL you want to track:

Secondly, choose how you want to see the data reported in Analytics by specifying the Campaign Source, Medium and Name:

The Campaign Medium is the over arching category and includes organic, cpc and referral as standard so I would recommend using ‘email’ for your email campaign.

Source is the next level down and can be more specific, here I would recommend using something like ‘summer newsletter’ or ‘red widget promotion’.

The Name can be as specific as you like, you could use a top level categorisation or you might even want to go as far as labelling each link differently, ie ‘header offer’, ‘specific blog post’ or ‘job ad 1′.

You can also use the extra fields depending on how much you want to track. I’d recommend having a look in Google Analytics and working out what kind of information you want to appear in each report, this will help you see what sort of label would work best for each area.