Tracking Email Clicks in Analytics

Many of us are using Google Analytics to measure the usual web metrics, but most of use are only using a small portion of this tool's functionality.

It's common practice to send registered users an email to confirm account activity, to keep them up to date via a newsletter, or to try and encourage return activity. In many cases we are not really measuring how effective these mailings are or how they impact on our website traffic.

At first glance it looks like a tricky problem, mail client applications will generally not pass a referrer and browser mail will be recorded as one of the hundreds of mail domains in use. Link Tagging is the simple solution, although there are a few options depending on how deep you want to go.

Source and Medium

By appending utm_source and utm_medium parameters to your links you can easily track who many visits are directly attributable to your mailings and see them in the All Traffic Sources report.

Here's an example of how your links should look:
http://www.yoursite.com/somepage.html?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=email

Setting the utm_source value will replace any referrer value as the Traffic Source so random browser domains will be consolidated under one value, along with any email clicks with no referrer which would usually be classed as "(direct)". This is the only required parameter of this type, any other utm_xxxx fields used in conjunction with utm_source are optional.

Using utm_medium=email is recommended, especially if you are using more than one utm_source value in different email types (e.g. Newsletter, AdminEmail, ReferAFriend) so that you can easily filter the results on the All Traffic Sources report.

Campaigns

Specifying a utm_campaign value can help group your links in a more meaningful way. This could be a sub group of your source categories (e.g. utm_campaign=200907 to identify this is the monthly Newsletter for July 2009) or you could use a campaign like utm_campaign=Winter-Sale across many sources (email, banner, CPC, etc). It all depends on what you want or need to measure. Whatever you choose, any utm_campaign values tracked will be displayed on the Traffic Sources->Campaigns report.

Content and Terms

These options are less common but still useful. Setting the utm_content parameter could help identify if text or html emails are getting more clicks. Alternatively you could track the comparative success of different creatives from the same campaign. utm_content values tracked will be displayed on the Traffic Sources->Ad Versions report.

I've included the utm_term here just for completeness. It's usually used to identify search terms or keywords purchased. utm_term values tracked will be displayed on the Traffic Sources->Keywords report.

Handy Hint

Even if you're already tracking your email clicks with another solution, it's probably worth adding these parameters (or at least some of them). As long as they are passed to the landing page it doesn't matter if you add them to the pre or post tracking URL. You may do some special tweaks so that your tracking solution passes utm_xxxx parameters on to the destination URL.

Analytics Debunks Charlatan

Yesterday I overheard a friend's phonecall with a salesman for an internet listing service. She runs a modest business with her website as the only advertising and bringing in enough customers to keep her booked weeks in advance.

The listing service was claiming that they could increase traffic to her site because they specialised in listing companies in her specialised field. I suggested that she should think carefully before throwing her money their way, since her website is fairly well optimised for search engines.

As it turned out, the listing service had offered her a one month free trial (which had just expired) and had been allegedly sending traffic her way already. I decided to spend a few minutes helping her evaluate the trial.

The first step was to look at their website. Sadly their homepage failed to load as most of the content was blocked by ABP - not a good start. Next we found her listing on their site, mostly content pasted from her homepage, although her business name was spelt incorrectly (twice). By this stage I was feeling underwhelmed.

So we decided to check out the traffic they've been sending to her site. Google Analytics had been in place for some time so we could easily measure the impact. The first thing we did was check the Traffic Sources report. Indeed there were 27 visits in the last month, although they never peaked higher than 2 per day and the bounce rate seemed pretty high to me.

I suggested we check on where these visitors were coming from and see if we could find out a little more about them so we set up a Custom Segment where Source contains the listing site's domain. We could see that almost all of the traffic came from London, except for 3 visits from Australia, coincidentally where the business was based. Digging further into the New vs. Returning Visitors report showed that all but one of the London visitors was the same person returning every day or so to generate traffic.

In my opinion this kind of listing service is a waste of money if you have followed the most basic SEO principals. Needless to say, my friend will not be engaging their services.

Ad Blocker Detection

Late last week I mentioned Adblock Plus in my list of Essential Add-on Tools for Firefox. Here's the description again, just in case you missed it:

Adblock Plus allows you to browse without ads. It works very well and is incredibly popular because of that. Users love it, advertisers and websites dependant on ad revenue hate it. As long as flash banners keep soaking up CPU cycles, I'll keep using it.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

Just about all websites rely on advertising revenue to some degree. The problem is, how do you measure the number of potential impressions you're losing to ABP?

A couple of weeks ago I cooked up a very simple solution that seems to perform quite well. In this example I'll track it with Google Analytics, but you could easily rework it to your own system.


ABP blocks items based on a list of exception rules. This detection script relies on a javascript file specifically named to be blocked by these rules. According to this script you have ABP enabled on this page (assuming you're viewing this on something that supports javascript).

Here's the code:

<script type="text/javascript">var hasABP='ABP';</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/advertising.adserver.bannerad.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">pageTracker._setVar(hasABP);</script>


The contents of the file /js/advertising.adserver.bannerad.js are:

var hasABP = '';

So after running this for a few hours, you should spot ABP users as 'ABP' in the Google Analytics User Defined section. In theory you could get some false positives, but the rate reported for me was so low that I think it's performing well.

Once you have some data collected, you can set up Custom Segment in Analytics' Advanced Segments and try and estimate the lost impressions based on page views.

User Segmentation in Google Analytics

You're probably using Google's free webstats product Analytics on at least one site. And to be honest, unless you're an anti-Google-domination zealot, there's little reason not to. It's easy to install and the tools are pretty good.

It's a shame there's no simple hourly traffic graph, and the Advanced Segments produce some fairly questionable results, but they are still in Beta and they do clearly state the "report is based on sampled data."

Aside from that, it's very easy to set it up, give the marketing guys "user" access and forget about it - which is what many of us do. This is where we fail. There is a lot of useful segmentation data Google Analytics collects that can give us technical insights.

Web-stats are so much more than unique visitors and page views. Analytics can give you a good grasp of your customers' browser version, operating system, screen resolution, java support, Flash version and even connection speed.

Geolocation stats can help you decide if your global reach warrants employing a Content Delivery Network.

You can even create your own segmentation using User Defined values. I like to use it to identify users as Anonymous, LoggedIn and Admins, but you can pretty much set any value you like using this statement after the usual tracking script:

<script type="text/javascript">pageTracker._setVar('SegmentX');</script>

As long as you don't go crazy inserting a unique id per user (remember this is a segmentation tool), you should be able to get some useful data back.