Using Google Analytics for Your Mailpro™ Emailing Service

Google Analytics is a tool available free of charge and developed by Google to analyze the visits of an internet site. Webmasters use this type of tracking software to analyze the inflow of visits on a website in a statistically precise way. Advertisers also use the Google analysis in order to obtain information on the generated visits. In fact, it is possible to create links between a Mailpro™ emailing service and the tracking from Google Analytics.

The tracker offered by Google will allow you to know where a visitor comes from, as well as from which emailing campaign and even which element in the email generated the visit. To take advantage of the tracking, you need to optimize the links present in your newsletters and email marketing.

Setting up such a system is not complicated. When you create your emailing campaign, it is enough to add some elements between the tags of the URL link. The goal is to collect at the same time information about the campaign which generated the visits. For web programming newbies, Google offers a tool to freely create links on the net. Here are the options you can specify, noting that the first three are mandatory:

• The source of the campaign, which corresponds to the origin of the link. This could be, for example a search engine. It is expressed by the key-word “ utm_source “.
• The support of the campaign, which is in general for advertisers the emailing service or newsletters. This option is expressed by the key-word “ utm_support ”.
• The name of the campaign expressed by the key-word “ utm_campaign “.
• The terms of the campaign, which gather under the option “ utm_term “ the keywords describing the link.
• The content of the campaign expressed using “ utm _content ” which allows you to difference the links which redirect to the same URL.

Create your links simply by inserting the keyword, followed by a = sign and the desired variable and separate the parameters by an & . Here is an example of a URL: http://www.mailpro.com/?utm_source=email_marketing11&utm_medium=bouton_produit1&utm_campaign=promotion2011

The easiest way to create a URL is to use the free Google URL creator. Click here to access it.

Thanks to Google Analytics, it is now possible to keep evidence of those elements of an emailing campaign which are performing the best. For example, let’s assume that an emailing service contains a promotion for a particular product. One can see in this email a photograph of the product, which when clicked redirects you to the product information page. This email also contains a heading, which can also be clicked and redirects to the same address. When analyzing the web page containing the product information, it will be possible to see if the link in the image brought in more visits than the link in the heading.

However, do not forget to check the Mailpro™ statistics. Google Analytics only supplies you with information about the visits a link generated, and not about your emailing campaign. The information concerning the opening rate, the email addresses, as well as the click rate can be found in the Mailpro™ tracking.

To sum up, Google Analytics can represent a complementary tool to the statistics from Mailpro™, because it allows the analysis of user behavior based on clicks. Advanced users can equally well benefit from the use of variables in Mailpro™ to optimize the parameters of the Google tracking links (using fields or the email).