A solid email campaign is essential to the health of your business. What’s just as-- if not more-- important is keeping tabs on how users are reacting to your emails.
But slogging through numbers and doing calculations to figure out your ROI, click-through rates, and opens is enough to make your head spin. And there’s always a chance that once you’ve done that, you find that your campaign isn’t performing as you would have hoped, even though you haven taken the care to craft your email content with an audience and goal in mind.
So how are you supposed to pinpoint what’s going wrong when there are so many metrics to keep track of?
That’s where Google Analytics and NeverBounce step in. This post details how they work in harmony to help you see the results you want.
Why you need email tracking analytics
Is your email marketing campaign:
- Reaching new customers?
- Meeting open rates?
- Generating leads?
- Driving conversions?
Since email campaigns see four times the ROI compared to other marketing methods, it’s key that you track your analytics (source).
Obtaining, interpreting, and transforming raw data into something usable can be a pain– we get that. Fortunately, Google Analytics makes it a cinch to track and view your email marketing statistics. From there, it’s easy to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
By tracking open rates, click-throughs, and bounce rates– as well as a few other metrics– you can go beyond wondering what’s wrong with your campaign. You can take concrete steps to adjust your content according to how your audience behaves, delivering them relevant and interesting content each time.
Why you should optimize with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that offers a bevy of features meant to help you improve your business– plus, it’s free to use.
For the purposes of email marketing analytics, it not only tracks clicks and opens, but also lets you follow the user’s journey beyond your email as they navigate your site.
Below are a few of our favorite things that Google Analytics can do for you.
Track email opens and link clicks
Google Analytics lets you easily determine the location your most active audience in the world is by viewing where people are opening your emails. From there, it’s easy to plan the timing of your email sends so they coincide when your users are the most active and most likely to see your content.
You can also see how quickly people open your emails after you send them out, then check how that number stacks up against previous emails. Link clicks, meanwhile, show you which content is resonating most powerfully with your readers.
Follow activity beyond emails
Open ratios and clicks are one thing, but what happens once they’re on your website is of equal importance. Google Analytics doesn’t stop tracking your visitor once they click out of your email and into your website– it follows them on their journey.
Gaining insight into how they interact with different pages on your site can help you pin down which forms of content are resonating. From there, you can refine and improve your messaging.
Segment your visitors
Google Analytics offers an Advanced Analytics section where you can split up your audience traffic according to a wide range of characteristics and figure out where in the world they’re coming from. By using this feature, you can hone in on a portion of your audience and get some insight on how to better appeal to them.
Keep track of your progress with advanced reporting
“Report” isn’t exactly a word that inspires excitement, but Google’s are easy to interpret. Visual representations of your data– think charts and graphs– are prominent here, so you don’t have to worry about calculations or percentages.
The more specific your data is, the better you can use it. Google Analytics provides you with details such as how many visitors came to a page because of a certain email campaign and how long they were on your site after reading your email.
This powerful form of data gives you the power to get into the nitty-gritty of what your audience is looking for from your content.
Better yet, what Google collects for you is real-time data that provides an always up-to-date snapshot of your metrics. You can peek at your performance at any time and be assured you’re seeing accurate numbers, whether you’re looking at monthly or daily statistics.
How to optimize your marketing campaigns with Google Analytics and NeverBounce
Now that you know how critical it is to track your metrics, we’ll show you how to make the most of Google Analytics and NeverBounce.
1. Set up a Google Analytics account
Thankfully, this part is easy. Visit google.com/analytics, sign into your account (or create one if you haven’t already), then set up a property in your Analytics account.
A property represents the website, app, or in this case email, that you want to track. After designating a property, you can set up a reporting view, add a tracking code to your emails, and start collecting all that valuable data your heart desires!
Check out Google’s guide for more in-depth steps.
2. Create a campaign with the tracking options of your choice.
We recommend using campaign tags to keep track of your email sends.
Google does automatically track your organic traffic from social media and other platforms, but we recommend setting up custom campaign tags to get a better look into your data and figure out which content is driving the most interest.
Here are some tags you’re likely to use:
Campaign name
As the title suggests, this denotes the name of the email marketing campaign. With it, you can organize your marketing campaign according to the medium.
In this scenario, you’d keep your email data and social media data separate by applying different Campaign Name tags to them.
Source
On a broader scale, this tag keeps track of where a link is posted, such as on Twitter or another website. In the case of emails specifically, this is a helpful tag if you’re using multiple email services or sending from your own domain.
Content
Emails with multiple calls to action benefit from this tag; it lets you view which CTAs drive more visitors. The content tag can be used to differentiate types of links in your emails (such as text vs. image links), so you can easily use it to run A/B tests.
When it comes to tracking the success of an email marketing campaign, you don’t have to rely on your instincts. Tools like Google Analytics and NeverBounce make it easy to keep track of where you are and where you’re headed, so you can refine your strategy as you go.