Accessing your Campaign Reports in Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that can be used to measure and report on traffic to your website. If you have a Google Analytics account setup for your site, you can also use it to track visitors coming in from the links in your email campaigns deployed via ThinkSend.
In conjunction with ThinkSend's own reporting, that can give you a very powerful way of determining what your customers are interested in, what they look at and where you can improve.
Finding your specific campaign details
Within Google Analytics, first click on "Traffic Sources" in the navigation on the left, and then click "Campaigns". This will display a list of all the campaigns that have been tagged for Google Analytics to track for you. This might include those sent with ThinkSend, a banner ad you've been tracking or clicks from a Google Adwords campaign.
In the example below, we want to see the results for the "April Newsletter" we just sent, highlighted in yellow. Click on that campaign to view the results.
Overview of the Campaign
Once you click on your campaign name, you're taken to a basic overview of the results so far, including the number of visits your campaign generated, the average number of pages viewed and much more.
Tracking Goal Conversions
The reports in Google Analytics really start to shine when you set them up to reflect what you're trying to get out of your Web site. The primary way of doing this is by setting up "Goals". For example, a goal might be to get a subscriber to download a whitepaper, complete a contact form, or possibly buy something.
Google Analytics lets you set up to 4 goals (each with multiple steps called "funnels" if you need to get really specific) in each account. For a complete walkthrough on setting up goals, Google has put together a complete guide here. Assuming you've setup some goals, you can see if any subscribers completed these goals by clicking on the "Goal Conversion" tab, next to "Site Usage".
Google Analytics also has a great feature that lets you assign a value to each goal. So, even if you're not actually selling something directly through your site, you can still generate estimates of the return on investment for your campaign based on the number of goals you convert. Here's a quick explanation of what we mean:
"A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. If, for example, your sales team can close 10% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50 (i.e. 10% of $500) to your 'Contact Me' goal."
Tracking Sales
If you run an e-commerce site of any kind, then you can track how many sales each campaign resulted in. You can turn on the e-commerce component of Google Analytics by editing the settings for that site. Here's a detailed walkthrough on how to track your sales data using Google Analytics.
To access the sales results for your campaign, click on the "E-commerce" tab (which will be visible as soon as you enable the e-commerce). This page shows you how much revenue has been generated as a result of your email campaign, the number of transactions, the per dollar value of each visitor and more.
Drilling down to subscribers
If you're interested in knowing what a specific subscriber got up to once they went to your site, change the Segment dropdown to "Ad Content". Now you can see the related site usage, goal conversion and e-commerce data for every subscriber in your list that visited your site from this campaign.You can even export this data from Google Analytics (click the "Export" button at the top of the page and select CSV format) and then ThinkSend can re-import it back into your account so you can send incredibly targeted follow up campaigns. For example, you might want to send a campaign only to those that made a purchase, or anyone who added a product to their shopping cart but didn't complete a purchase.
Determining which email links were most effective
While the Link Activity Report in your ThinkSend account does a good job showing you what links in your campaign were popular, Google Analytics lets you take that a step further and see exactly what each link in your campaign produced.You can drill down and see exactly which specific link results in the most visits to your site, goal conversions and even sales. To access this data, select the Segment drop down, and click "Keyword". This will then list all of the links in your email and how each of them performed, pictured below. Clicking on the "Goal Conversion" or "E-commerce" tabs will also reveal that data for each link in your campaign.
How do I set the keyword for each link?
The keyword used to identify each link is automatically generated by ThinkSend when your campaign is imported. If it's a text-based link, we'll use the words that are being linked. If it's an image, we'll use the alt tag for that image. You can also overwrite both of these by adding a title to the link.
