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.

Us Now film

Usually I avoid this kind of post, but I thought this documentary was worth sharing with everybody. "Us Now" is a film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet. I found it to be both interesting and inspiring and recommend watching it.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

It's also available in seven parts on YouTube if you can't use Vimeo.

Top Tips: Problem Solving

There will come a time when all your problem solving skills will hit a brick wall. These are some simple but effective tips to help kick start the process whether you are debugging, optimizing performance or whatever it is you're working on.

Scribble It
I'm a firm believer that nobody can hold everything in their head, this is why I recommend using a whiteboard or notepad to scribble out ideas, notes, lists and diagrams that can help your problem solving. Seeing everything laid out before you can also help give a clearer picture of a problem or reveal relationships you had not considered.

Discuss It
Vocally describing a problem to somebody else is a great way to spark ideas. The act of talking about it seems to allow your brain to follow new trains of thought and find new inspiration. It doesn't even matter if the other person fully understands what you're talking about. Inanimate objects don't really work for me, but if nobody else is available then even your cat or dog might help get you back on track.

Find Your Thinking Place
Everybody has a special thinking place where the ideas just seem to flow better. It doesn't really matter where it is, it only matters that you've identified it so that you can use it to your advantage. It could be walking to the local coffee shop, riding a bike, driving home, or walking the dog in the park. For me it's in the shower, I get all my best ideas there and actually write most of these posts in my head in the shower.

Sleep On It
Sometimes the best approach is to step away from a problem and leave it to background processing. If you've been thinking about something for a large part of the day, your subconcious will keep trying to make sense of it while you sleep. I couldn't count the number of times the answer has suddenly come to me at 3AM.

How To: Use a PS3 with LCD monitor

This topic is a little step away from my usual content but the question has come up a couple of times lately and I thought I'd post a "How To" guide.

Many owners are content with using their TV for PlayStation 3 games and Blu-ray DVD. Some will be taking advantage of recent advances in HDTV and using an HDMI cable, while others are stuck with standard TV via an RCA AV cable or SCART (in Europe).

If you own a recently manufactured LCD monitor, then it's possible that you could take advantage of the PS3's HD capabilities without having to shell out for a new HDTV. Many LCD models feature a DVI input (digital) as well as SVGA (analog).


Converting HDMI -> DVI
The PlayStation3 has two different audio/video outputs. The HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) port will transmit uncompressed digital data for video and audio. We can covert this to a monitor friendly format by using a HDMI->DVI cable. This cable drops the audio data but allows the digital video data to plug into a standard monitor DVI input. I'm using one of these cheap HDMI->DVI cables into a LG FLATRON W2042T and I'm more than happy with the result. The monitor also accepts SVGA which I use for my PC and switch between the two using the monitor's "Source" button.

What about audio?
The HDMI->DVI conversion drops the audio data - since most monitors don't support audio, especially not digital audio, you're probably going to need something else to produce the sound. The PlayStation 3 simultaneously produces output on both HDMI and AV channels, so we can use the AV audio feed. In my set up I am plugging the Red and White RCA leads into a Logitech X-230 Multimedia Speaker System via an adaptor that came with the speakers (2x RCA female to stereo 3.5mm female). This is probably the best sounding system in the lower price bracket and features a handy headphone jack on the front of one speaker.

What about Xbox 360?
As I understand it, this technique will not work with the the XBox 360 as it only transmits data on either HDMI OR standard AV. Apparently you can plug your Xbox 360 into SVGA using this Xbox 360 VGA Component Audio Cable. I've not seen the output quality, but from what I've read it's quite acceptable, although some users experience ghosting on text.

RSS: Learn To Burn...

If you are regularly publishing any kind of content online, then you are probably also providing an RSS feed. (If you've been living in a cave for since 2005 and never heard of it, then you should read this introduction to RSS.)

RSS is a tricky thing to measure, requests are not tracked like normal webstats, and are commonly anonymous or via a proxy. The frequency of requests is dependant on the user's feed reader and could be daily, weekly, hourly or even every minute (or anything in between). This is why it's important to have a good grasp of how much bandwidth and processing resources your RSS feeds are using.

RSS Caching

The easiest way to offset the processing cost is to cache your feed. Depending on your site's publishing schedule and implementation, the caching period and method used will be different. The basic idea is to dump your feed into a file and serve that.

On each request check if the cache file exists and if it is younger than 15 minutes. If not then build the feed and dump it into the cache file, ready for the next request. Depending on the frequency of requests, this can reduce your feed building resource cost considerably.

Introducing FeedBurner

Feedburner has been providing RSS feed management tool since 2004. By October 2007, they reportedly hosted over a million feeds for 584,832 publishers. In June 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google Inc., and shortly after two of their popular PRO services (MyBrand and TotalStats) were made free to all users. By August, 2008, Google had completed migrating FeedBurner into its group of services.

FeedBurner works very well with the major blog publishing sites, but it's also worth investigating if your site is standalone.

The initial payoffs of using FeedBurner is that they can help you get a handle on the size of your subscription base, and will cache and serve your feed, thereby absorbing much of the processing and bandwidth costs.

There has been quite a bit of discussion about the accuracy of subscriber stats provided by the FeedBurner service. As stated earlier in this article, RSS stats are problematic due to the plethora of clients and the complications of anonymity and proxy services. Having said that, they service offered is a lot better than no stats and in my opinion the benefits outweigh the cost many times over.

Don't Lose Your Audience

One of the important tips about integrating FeedBurner is to make sure that your subscribers still subscribe to your site's feed URL and are redirected to your FeedBurner URL. This way, if you ever decide to drop the FeedBurner service, then you won't leave your subscribers stranded with a defunct FeedBurner URL. Google has been quite open about this issue, if you know where to look.

If you are redirecting traffic you need to make one small change to your FeedBurner options to make this work properly - but it's not that easy to find... Click on the Optimize tab for your feed, and then BrowserFriendly in the Services menu. At the bottom of the form, in the Content Options section, there is a link with the text "Use your redirected feed URL on your BrowserFriendly landing page". Click on that and then enter your site's feed URL.

This change should result in most subscribers using your site's URL, however, this still doesn't seem to work correctly with Firefox's Live Bookmarks. I haven't found a decent work around for this yet, or even much evidence that it is an issue, but for me it never works, so be aware. Even the "ClearFeed" landing page is somewhat confusing when Live Bookmarks are used, which is a concern considering Firefox's popularity.

FeedBurner Pros vs Cons

Pros

• Free stats/caching service
  
• Reliable infrastructure
  
• Simple to use

Cons

• Stats are tied to a single Google login
  
• Subscription stats allegedly fluctuate
  
• Some Firefox Live Bookmarks issues

Common Sense SEO Tips

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is often thought of as a mystical dark art. Many folks are making a good living off giving advice on how to increase your ranking in the major search engines, some of them even know what they're talking about. In many cases the "tricks" involved are common sense and can be implemented without too much trouble. The clever part is recognising what is the best approach for each particular site.

Here are my best simple tips to get you found via Search Engines

Search Term Targeting
Think about what terms people would type into a search engine if they wanted to find your site. It's better to get 10 visitors who will be interested in your content than 100 visitors who will immediately leave and never return. Compile a list of terms you would expect your site to be well ranked for and target those terms. Make sure these terms appear in your page's body text. Keep the list in a spreadsheet and record your Search Engine ranking so you can measure improvement.

Good Content
Make sure you have a decent chunk of crawlable text. Webcrawlers don't index text if it's just in an image. Make sure the content includes the terms you want to be found for. If your product or service is regional then include those details on every page (the page footer does nicely), then you'll be more likely to be found when people search for "kitten jugglers London SW15".

Page Title
The content of the page's <title> tag is taken as a description of the page content. This is a key index for your pages. Make sure the title is clear but succinct. Limit it to 5-10 words, including your company name. Don't use the same title on multiple pages or they may be grouped as one page in search engine results.

Well Formed Links
Never ever use click here links. Link text is one of the best indexing opportunities you have, don't squander it. The text in links to your pages are treated in a similar way to page titles but links to your pages are aggregrated.

Meta Tags
Do use the keyword and description metatags. Keep it clear and simple. The keywords tag is said to be less used of late due to heavy abuse, but Yahoo claims to still support it. The description tag should provide a concise explanation of your page's content.

<meta name="description" content="An introduction to the nocturnal habits of hedgehogs of United Kingdom">
<meta name="keywords" content="hedgehog United Kingdom UK Erinaceinae nocturnal insectivore furze-pig">

If your website includes mulitple languages, translated content or is not in English you should consider also using the language tag.

Seeding
If your site is brand new and hasn't been indexed yet, you can get the ball rolling by adding it to the Open Directory Project. Search engines are an incestuous bunch feeding off each other and this is a good entry point as it's used by AltaVista, A9, AOL, Ask, Clusty, Gigablast, Google, Lycos, MSN, and Yahoo.

Webmaster Tools
Google's Webmaster Tools can tell you if anything is going wrong on your site that could be affecting your search ranking. You can read about Webmaster Tools in an earlier post.

Always get a Baseline first

As developers, we often spend time optimising, tweaking or redesigning to increase performance. It's fairly easy to measure performance increases when optimizing code or systems, but it's a lot harder to gauge the effectiveness of User Interface changes.

In many cases the UI choices we make are subjective at best. In some cases, our design decisions can actually make things worse, not better. There are some interesting anecdotes about this in this recent post.

In order to make sure we are making the right decisions, rather than just a bunch of assumptions, we need to measure the effectiveness of the current implementation in order to compare with the improved version.

Depending on what it is that you're changing, this could impact on conversions, page hits, or data collection rates. You'll need to decide the best way to measure the effectiveness of the changes, but without data to measure it, you'll never really know if you're doing it wrong.

It seems like a simple idea, but it applies for all optimisation and is often overlooked. A simple rule to follow is to remember to ask "How will we know if this works?" before you implement a change.