Would you like to track your email campaign beyond your subscriber click-throughs?  If you do, our integration with Google Analytics (GA) will be your new best friend, next to eConnect Email itself.  Currently, email marketing reporting can only follow subscribers up to the point where they click on the links in your email campaign after which, the tracking ends there.  But if you are using Google Analytics to track your website, you can extend your email campaign tracking right to your website.

First, before you can do this, you have to ensure 2 things:

1. Set up Google Analytics to start tracking on your website.  We are not going into details on this but since we are nice guys, we will give you a link to Google Analytics tutorials.  The tutorials were done in 2007 but good enough to get you started.
2. Enable Google Analytics in your eConnect Email account.

To enable Google Analytics in eConnect Email, simply do the following:

1. Log in to your eConnect Email account and click on Account tab.
2. Next, click on My Account tab follow by Campaign Settings.
3. You will see an item called Google Analytics.
   
4. Click on the checkbox labeled Turn on Google Analytics for my campaigns to activate Google Analytics for your campaign.  Then, click on the Save Changes button and you are done!

Now, when you start your new campaign, you will see one additional step, that is Google Analytics.

Proceed with setting up your campaign as normal until you reach Step 3, which is Google Analytics?.  We understand that not all campaigns require tracking with Google Analytics. That is the reason why we give you the option to enable it individually when you need it.  To enable Google Analytics for your campaign, click on the checkbox labeled  Enable Google Analytics for this campaign.

Upon clicking on the checkbox, you will see the following screen.

By default, we will take the campaign name you entered previously, but you are free to change it, simply enter the new campaign name in the Campaign name field.  Do take note that changing this field will not affect your actual campaign name set previously.

On top of that, we added the following information:

1. Source: startedm – This will allow you to know that the traffic source is coming from startedm
2. Medium: Email – This tell you that your traffic is coming from email
3. Keywords: Links title or Alt text – If you put title tags in your links or alternate texts in your image links it will be captured by Google Analytics for more detailed reporting.

Once you have set all this up, proceed with your campaign setup as normal.  eConnect Email will now know that you would like to extend your tracking to Google Analytics and will automatically add additional codes to all your links in your campaign.

That’s it and you are done!

In my next posting, we will be looking at Google Analytics and where you can view your reports.  For now, happy email marketing and don’t spam!