How to Set Up Email Marketing Campaign With Google Analytics

September 24, 2021

You need a great email campaign if you want your business to thrive. It is equally crucial to keep track of how your emails are received by your recipients. Google Analytics, popularly used for website analytics, can also be a great tool for tracking email marketing campaigns.

How to Set up Email Marketing Campaign with Google Analytics
Image from Unsplash by Edho Pratama

With a Google Analytics account connected to your email account, you can easily track the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

In this article, you will find full instructions on how to set up google analytics for email marketing in order to truly track your success.

Table of Contents

TL;DR

  • Creating and tracking metrics for an email marketing campaign can be tricky, especially if you have different goals for each campaign, but every email marketer should become familiar with the basic email marketing metrics.
  • Google Analytics can help you to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign by keeping track of links clicked and emails opened, segmenting your customers, determining what type of content resonates best with your visitors and customizing your data reports.
  • You can set up Google Analytics Email Tracking to measure Email Opens and Clicks, but you must create a Google Analytics account and follow a few steps before you can do that.
  • The Google Analytics software offers statistics on organic traffic generated from social media and other platforms, but if you want a more precise view of which content is most popular, we recommend creating custom campaign tags.

Email Marketing Metrics You Should Be Tracking

As you plan your campaign, it is essential to clearly define what your goals and KPIs are and which metrics should be tracked to help you achieve them.

Open Rate

In email marketing, the open rate refers to the ratio of opened emails to the number delivered. Testing the sender name and subject line will bring you the highest open rate. Create a copy that will entice recipients to open the message.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate refers to the percentage of links in an email message clicked compared to the number of emails delivered. The content of your email, particularly the images, copy, and calls-to-action, is crucial to increasing click-through rates.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of emails that were rejected after being sent. They can be grouped into two categories:

  • A hard bounce (permanent) is an invalid (or non-existent) email address that will not receive the message.
  • Soft bounces (temporary) are the result of an overfilled inbox, notifications of temporary outages, or temporary server problems.
hard vs soft bounce in emails
Source: cxl.com

Conversion Rate

In email marketing, the conversion ratio is the percentage of subscribers who accomplish the desired goal or become customers. Your email conversion rate indicates your effectiveness in reaching your objective.

Your email should always have a clear action you want your recipients to take:

  • Place an order.
  • Check out your blog for an article.
  • Subscribe by filling out the form.
  • Attend a webinar or event.

Unsubscribe Rate

In email marketing, unsubscribe rates are used to measure the rate at which customers unsubscribe from a mailing list. This is inevitable since people always unsubscribe from mailing lists.

It is important to keep track of these trends to understand why your audience may not be engaging.

Overall ROI

ROI (return on investment) is a crucial metric. By evaluating ROI directly, email campaigns can be cost-effectively evaluated.

Based on the income you receive from your emails and the amount it costs to send them, you can predict future earnings and decide how much to invest in your future campaigns.

It is possible to estimate an approximate ROI through Google Analytics with assisted conversions, even when people click a link in an email and return to it later.

Email Tracking Analytics: Why You Need Them

Email marketing is a leading channel for customer acquisition. It's cheap, it's easy, and it's highly effective. Email marketing lets companies get more value out of every direct customer they contract.

With that said, not every company uses email marketing 100% right. There are some specific criteria your company can base an email strategy on.

How much time do you devote to email marketing? Do you have bounce rates above 20% or do you only contact people who have already referred you? Is sending mass emails to your entire customer base effective? If so, these are signs that your email strategy is working and you should consider scaling it up next time around.

Keep an eye and observe, Is your email marketing campaign:

  • Getting new customers?
  • Meeting open rates?
  • Generating leads?
  • Increasing conversions?

Email campaigns are four times more effective than other marketing methods, so you must track your analytics.

It can be difficult to obtain, process, and transform raw data into anything usable. But thanks to Google Analytics, tracking, and viewing email marketing statistics is a breeze. After you have set up your campaign, you can easily measure its effectiveness.

Keeping an eye on open rates, click-through rates, and bounce rates– as well as a few other metrics– can help you get beyond wondering why your campaign didn't work. Thus, you can tailor your content to meet the needs of your audience every time, delivering them relevant content.

Google Analytics Optimization: How It Helps With Email Marketing

There are many features in Google Analytics that can help your business–and it's free!

It is a useful tool for tracking clicks and opens of your emails, but it can also track your subscribers' journeys on your site as they navigate away from the email.

Keeping Track of Links Clicked and Emails Opened

Google Analytics is a tool that lets you track all the sources of traffic for your website. It is crucial to understand where traffic comes from when you are running an online business.

If you start a new website, you must install Google Analytics immediately to start gathering traffic data.

The ability to track what works and what doesn't on your website allows you to pinpoint different sources of traffic and why people visit your site.

You can also discover how quickly people open your emails after you send them, then you can compare those numbers against previous ones. Links clicks, meanwhile, can give you an idea of which content is most popular.

An excellent online growth strategy begins with having a keen understanding of how people find your website. Being able to view your traffic patterns with Google Analytics can quickly give you the power to make data-driven decisions about your online marketing campaign.

Checking More Than Just Emails

Having good open rates and clicks is one thing, but what happens on your site after visitors arrive is equally important. Google Analytics tracks your visitor from the moment they open your email until they leave and return to your website.

You can determine what types of content are resonating by understanding how users interact with different pages of your site. This will allow you to improve your messaging.

Segmenting Your Visitors

The segmentation of Google Analytics allows you to get insights by digging deeper into your best metrics.

You can divide your audience traffic in Google Analytics according to a wide range of characteristics and find out where they are coming from by using Advanced Analytics. It is a feature that lets you pinpoint an audience portion and see how better to reach them.

You can track practically everything that happens on your website using Google Analytics, making it a gold mine for marketers. Google Analytics segments also allow you to segment your account data into different subsets.

A segment can, for instance, allow you to view data for someone using a particular device, or view data for someone based on their gender.

Customization and Data Reports

Unlike other analytics programs, Google Analytics gives you the option of customizing reports, dashboards, and alerts, and you can also apply third-party tools to analyze data to fit your company's unique requirements.

It's easy to customize reports, dashboards, and alerts so that you can see the information you need at a glance.

There are many predefined reports and dashboards in Google Analytics that you can use to get started. A dashboard could, for example, show you instantly how your website is performing or any SEO metrics.

By creating custom reports, you can quickly generate reports that you can share with others to make faster decisions based on accurate data. Also, you can set custom alerts that are sent to your e-mail whenever certain milestones are reached or specific goals are reached.

Data that is more specific can be used better. You can use Google Analytics to find out how many people linked to a certain page because of an email campaign and how long they stayed on your site after reading your email.

You can use this data to understand exactly what your audience wants from your content, with its power of insight.

Furthermore, Google provides live data about your metrics so you are always up-to-date. No matter what time of day you look at your daily or monthly statistics, you can be sure you're seeing accurate data.

The Right Way to Optimize Marketing Campaigns Using Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics, you can set up Email Tracking to track Email Open Rates and Clicks. Here are the steps you need to follow:

Step 1: Create a Google Analytics Account

The first step in setting up Email Tracking Google Analytics is to create a Google Analytics account.

google analytics home

A Google Account is required to access Google Analytics, but the tracked Property (your Website or App) must be set up before you can collect and review traffic data.

Step 2: Create a trackable URL

Start by creating a special URL that captures specific reporting data. You can build custom tracking URLs here with the help of Google.

A few parameters will need to be specified, including the tracking ID, which can be found under the Property Settings tab. As well as specifying a customer ID (CID), you need to specify other items such as the hit type, event category, event action, and the path and title of the tracked item.

Step 3: Insert the URL in the Email

Once the trackable URL has been created, it needs to be inserted into the email so that Google Analytics can fully track the email. You should not paste the URL directly into the body of the message. The URL link can be conveniently inserted in some part of the body of the email and then sent to the prospect.

google analytics set up

Step 4: Create a Campaign with the Tracking Options of Your Choice

Tracking your email campaigns is best done using campaign tags.

Google Analytics software provides information on organic traffic from social media and other platforms, but we highly recommend setting up custom campaign tags to get an even more detailed picture of what content is most popular.

Campaign Name

The name of the email marketing campaign is indicated in this title. This will help you organize your campaigns based on medium.

Using different Campaign Name tags for the emails and social media, you can keep them separated.

Source

Rather than keep track of where links are posted, such as on Twitter, this tag allows for tracking where a link is posted. If you're sending from several email providers or are using your own domain, this tag is particularly useful.

Content

The tag is particularly useful for emails with multiple call-to-actions since it lets you know which CTAs are most effective. Content tags enable you to distinguish different types of links in your emails (for example, text vs. image links), making A/B tests easier.

Wrapping Up

Google Analytics can be used to track email campaigns very effectively. As you track more, you will be able to learn more about your audience, which will help you optimize your email marketing campaigns.

You can create content and imagery your audience will appreciate by paying attention to its demographics. In this way, you can craft an experience that your audience will love and keep coming back for more.

With a deep understanding of how your audience views and interacts with your email, you will be able to determine if you're reaching the right people. But even the most powerful email in the world won't make a difference if no one hears it. VerifyBee can make sure your message is heard and received.

Want to get clean and accurate email lists? Sign up today with VerifyBee and verify your email lists in no time!

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