Google Analytics: Using Metrics to Track and Improve Email Marketing Results

Google Analytics has become one of the industry's most powerful Internet Marketing tools, helping advertisers, publishers and website owners improve their sales conversion, campaign targeting and marketing initiatives. Previously dubbed Urchin, Google Analytics is a robust web statistics software application provided by Google free of charge.
Simple and easy to use, anyone can start benefiting from Google Analytics in just a few minutes. Just add some basic code onto your website, and you're ready to begin monitoring visitor trends.

After basic set-up, marketers can track important statistics like visitor referrers, navigation paths, page views, geo-location data and browser type. Know where your visitors come from, whether referred by search engines, ads, emails, blogs or affiliates. Know which cities, states and countries your primary visitor traffic resides in, so you can more carefully target future ad campaigns.

While hugely popular with webmasters and usability professionals, some Marketers have yet to realize the value Google Analytics plays when used to monitor email marketing campaigns. Track, evaluate and analyze results using colorful graphs and charts. Google Analytics makes it easier to identify trends, improve usability and increase your return on investment.

Email Marketing Campaign Set-Up

Using Google Analytics, email marketers gain greater control over the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of each campaign. Send carefully targeted, relevant messages, improve revenue opportunities and enhance your business reputation.

To get started, create a Google Analytics account by visiting www.google.com/analytics. Follow the directions provided to place tracking code onto the relevant website files. Once you've created a Google Analytics account and placed the provided code into your website, you'll need to add parameters to URLs in each email marketing message. These denote which visitors arrive as a result of each email marketing campaign.

While some email marketing products, like StreamSend, add these parameters automatically, it takes just a few minutes to set it up manually.

Google Analytics looks for a few basic values in each link, namely the campaign source, campaign medium and campaign name. To set-up these values manually, simply change the parameter names shown in parentheses below:

1. Campaign Source (utm_source). This identifies the name of your email marketing system, such as StreamSend. If you don't use an email marketing system, you can label your campaign source 'Email Marketing'.

2. Campaign Medium (utm_medium). This identifies the campaign instrument used. In the case of email marketing, your medium is 'email'.

3. Campaign Name (utm_campaign). This identifies the name of your campaign. The Campaign Name helps you differentiate between various campaigns or unique messages within each. Most Email Marketers use their message subject line or other identifying value for this parameter.

Using this process, campaign managers can monitor in-bound visitor traffic for any destination URL, whether a main landing page, a product page or other sub-page.

Example: Main Landing Page

* Before tagging: http://www.example.com/

* After tagging: http://www.example.com/?utm_source=StreamSend&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=My%2BEmail%2BSubject

Example: Sub-Page

* Before tagging: http://www.example.com/index.php?page=home

* http://www.example.com/...e&utm_source=StreamSend&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=My%2BEmail%2BSubject

Tracking Email Campaign Results

Once an email campaign is properly coded and delivered, Google Analytics automatically monitors resulting website traffic. Find out which links were most popular with your recipients, when they visited your website, how long they stayed and where they navigated following arrival. Then adjust campaigns, body text layout and other variables to improve results over time.

To view campaign results:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account.

2. On your Dashboard, click 'Traffic Sources'.

3. View your 'Top Traffic Sources' or click 'View Full Report' to see all traffic sources.

4. Locate and click the link identifying your email marketing Campaign Source. In our example above, your Campaign Source is your email marketing product, i.e. StreamSend, or 'Email Marketing'.

On your Campaign Source page, Google Analytics provides details on the number of visitors generated by your campaign, the number of pages they visited, average time on your website, percent of new visitors to your website and the average bounce rate.

Campaign managers can also drill-down using the segments drop-down menu. This provides even greater detail on individual campaigns, keywords, geographic regions, browser types, operating systems and visitor activity, like the most popular landing and exit pages. Each results page provides the means to drill-down even further and fine-tune your data.

Google Analytics dramatically enhances the abilities e-commerce firms have in retaining and converting customers. Simply use the E-commerce tab to display purchase information to calculate ROI numbers for your campaigns.

Using Google Analytics, Email Marketers can discover simple ways to more effectively tailor their promotional messages, design and layout to their audience's preferences, minimize steps in the purchase process, reduce shopping cart abandonment, improve landing page effectiveness and keep visitors on your website even longer by identifying and optimizing the weak links where most of your visitors exit. Use today's robust delivery and tracking tools, and make each message count.


Read fullpost...

Understanding Your Website Visitors – Avoid Website Failure

Many people have hard time to attract visitors to their websites. This is the major problem any webmaster will face once you decide to build and run a website or blog. Visitors are the life line of any website. However, not many know what are the types of visitors are there in the World Wide Web. Mainly we could divide them into two major categories.Random Visitors

Random visitors or not targeted traffic are the visitors who visit your site at random and they are not visiting mainly looking for certain information which your website could offer. These random visitors could be at a website because they accidentally found the site or just browsing the internet looking for some information which would attract their interest to read further. This type of visitors carries little value to website owners who intend to sell something using their sites as the traffic is not targeted traffic.

Targeted Visitor

This type of visitors to sites is highly valued as these people are looking for certain information which they need from various sites. If your website could offer them what they need, the chances are they will stick around and read further because the information they are looking for is provided by your website. As for online entrepreneurs, these targeted visitors mean there is a much greater chance for them to sell or promote a product as the visitors are interested in the information the site could offer.

Therefore, if you are looking for improving your website return on investment, then you should increase the number of targeted visitors and not random visitors.


Read fullpost...

Website Promotion Methods

If you own a website or a blog then you should know a lot about it`s promotion. Website promotion is needed to build strong traffic to your website. There are some basic principles which you should understand if you want to earn revenue from your website. First of all you should start with on page optimization. Your web page content should be rich with the keywords which are used by the internet users to find your product or services. A keyword rich website draws lot of traffic from the search engines.There are several strategies which can be used to promote a website or a blog. Let`s discuss about them one by one. It is a good idea to start a link building campaign. It is a good idea to exchange links with reputed websites which are related to the topic of your website. You can also build an email list. An email list can bring a lot of traffic.

You should consult a professional who specializes in SEO. He can help you a lot in every sphere of link building process. There are many things which can be done by a SEO firm.

The most common methods which are being used by webmasters to promote their websites are directory submission, article submission, forum posting, blog commenting, press release submission, search engine submission, social bookmarking submission and many more. All these methods help in building links for the website. Always remember that links you are building should be of high quality. High quality links can give a lot of exposure. While building the links you should continuously monitor the traffic coming to your website. There are many tools and websites which can help you in analyzing the traffic. In this way you can know about the sources which are giving you maximum traffic.

There are many methods which can help you in building links but not all of them will be effective for your website. You should try new methods if something is not working for you.

Do you own more than one website? Do you have enough time to promote your websites? There are lots of SEO firms online which provide high quality services. You should do some research before opting a SEO firm. The firm website should be reputed and old. It is a good idea to go through the prices and services which they offer. You should plan your budget before starting a link building campaign.

It is a good idea to go through similar websites providing same services. In this way you can compare the prices. You should find lots of information related to this topic. There are many websites which offer free articles related to website promotion. It is a good idea to join a webmaster forum. A webmaster forum can help you a lot in learning new promotional techniques. You can also share tips and techniques with experienced webmasters.

Promoting something is a bit difficult process and needs lots of hard work and patience. Link building process will become bit easier for you by following some tips and techniques which I have stated above.


Read fullpost...