There’s no denying that Google Analytics is popular. In fact, it’s the most widely used site traffic analysis software. So, it’s no surprise that we field a lot of queries about ways to combine email marketing and Google Analytics (GA).

While we’re still working on complete GA integration with our existing reporting tools, you’ll be happy to hear there are some things you can do now to put GA to work on your email campaigns. Adding GA tracking to your campaigns can give you great insight on what subscribers do after they’ve clicked on a campaign link and landed on your site. Combined with GA Goals, you’ll get a great perspective on just how effective your campaigns can be.

Getting started is simple in most cases, all you need is a GA account. Keep in mind that any page you want to track will need to include the analytics code, so if your email campaign landing pages don’t already include that code, add it before you start sending optimized traffic there.

Next, you’ll need to modify links in your mailing to include GA tracking codes. From here on, we’ll use a phony example to illustrate how your links change. Our dummy site is a1widgets.com, and this particular campaign is designed to drive traffic to /new_widget.html, a landing page with order form for the latest widget.

Normally, links in the campaign would look like http://a1widgets.com/new_widget.html. However, we’re going to add a few GA tracking codes, utm_campaign, utm_source, and utm_medium. There are other tracking codes available, but these three are sufficient to get started.

utm_campaign identifies the marketing campaign that this mailing is a part of. If it’s part of a larger strategy you may wish to align this value with that. In this example though, we’re going to say that the campaign is the monthly email ad, therefore utm_campaign=MonthlyEmailAd.

utm_medium describes how the message got to the site visitor. Simply using Email is usually enough. So utm_medium=Email.

utm_source is where things get interesting. Historically, “source” has always described “who” so this is a great place to push in any demographic information you have in your list, e.g. age, gender, geographic location. If you don’t have that information available to you (and why not?) it should suffice to use a general term. We’ll use ActiveCustomers, so we get utm_source=ActiveCustomers.

These three parameters need to be tacked on to our landing page URL as a query string. If you’re not familiar with query strings, they’re very simple, just extra information that you can add to a URL in the following format: ?parameter=value&parameter=value etc., etc. To keep things simple, don’t use spaces or special characters in your values unless you’re comfortable with URL encoding.

Ultimately, we get this as our new URL:
http://a1widgets.com/new_widget.html?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=ActiveCustomers&utm_campaign=MonthlyEmailAd

And that’s that. At this point, assuming that you’ve got the GA tracking code in your landing page, you’re ready to send. Remember that GA statistics will be delayed about 24 hours.

Once you do start to see some statistics roll in, you’ll be pleased at the insight into your campaigns. The image blow is a sample traffic report indicating visits by campaign and source. Remember in our example, campaign identified the specific marketing effort and the source indicated the source of the subscribers.

Here we have goal conversions by source and medium.

Soon we’ll be integrating this data directly with our standard reporting as well as providing automatic campaign tagging but until them don’t hesitate to get started applying GA tracking to your mailings. If you have any questions, contact Reachmail support at support@reachmail.com and keep an eye on the blog for more advanced examples.

If you’ve uploaded a list today you’ll have noticed that we made some changes to the field selection screen in the list upload process. In order to make the process more clear we reduced the field selection method to a simple drop-down menu placed just above the column data sample, replacing our old scroll box of field names.

That’s not the best part though. Our favourite aspect of this upgrade is that field selections are now automatic. That’s right, so long as the uploaded file has a header row containing field names, we’ll automatically apply the matching name. No more scrolling and selecting.

If you’re not using header rows in your list files, they’re easy to add, just make the first row in the list a definition for each column. In the CSV sample below, the header row has been used to indicate that the fields in the file are email, first name, last name, state, and zip code.

"Email","First Name","Last Name","State","Zip"
"bob@yahoo.com","Bob","Jones","IL","60604"

Enjoy the new and improved list upload. If you have any questions or if something doesn’t appear to be working correctly, please contact us at 312-229-0070 x1 or support@reachmail.com

This past year has revealed a trend in how recipients interact with email: More and more of them are engaging via mobile devices.

After accounting for about one third of all views last March, mobile views have been on a steady rise, finishing February 2013 at 43% of all views.

This shift in recipient patterns means that understanding how recipients interact with your mailings is more important than ever. Email remains the preferred communication channel between businesses and their customers so it’s important to make mailings as sympathetic to customers’ desires as possible. Why send them a mailing optimized for the desktop when they’re likely to read it on a mobile device?

But before you go reconfiguring all your messages, it’s important to understand just what engagement methods your subscribers are using. That’s where we can help. Reachmail’s API now features a full complement of mobile reporting tools. The OpenDetail, LinkDetail, and LinkSummary now include data on the browser vendors and a mobile/desktop designation. You’ll be able to quickly gather data on who engages via a mobile device, if particular campaigns do better in mobile devices, if specific lists contain more mobile subscribers, and more.

If you’re not an API user, take heart, these features and some great visualizations are coming shortly to the regular user interface.