Email analytics let’s you know how your email campaign is doing. Google Analytics 4 offers powerful email analytics that can help you track the success of your email marketing campaigns. In this blog post, I will show you how to set up email link tracking using GA4. I will also discuss the benefits of using Google Analytics 4 for email marketing and provide a few tips on how to get the most out of its features. Read on to get a better handle on your email marketing campaign!
Email Analytics Using Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can help you track email opens and clicks, as well as measure conversions. Tracking email clicks helps you understand not only how the content of your email performs, but also provides insight into how effective your landing page is.
Creating Your Google Analytics Account
If you don’t already have a GA account, you will need to create one. To do this, go to the GA website and click on the “Sign Up” button. On the next page, enter your email address and choose a password. Once you have done this, click on the “Create Account” button. Google will prompt you to confirm the account.
If you already have an account, common sense, just log into it.
You will need to have a property (formerly web or app property) already set up. If you don’t, the following video will guide you though this step.
The Benefits of Email Analytics Link Tracking
Simply put, email analytics link tracking is a process by which you can track email clicks. This information can help you to measure the success of your email marketing campaigns and improve your conversions.
For example you might want to track a promotional offer in an email, or maybe a blog promotion email to an important post.
If you don’t leverage email analytics, to track those links, anybody who does click on them, would be included in Google’s “Direct” source statistic, so you’d not be able to distinguish those click as coming from your email campaign.
In simpler terms… There would be nowhere for you to know which traffic is coming from your email campaign – And if you have more than one email campaign running, then which click came from which campaign.
Using GA4 to track email analytics, email clicks, helps solve this problem with 3 powerful benefits:
- Email click tracking helps to isolate email campaign traffic from other traffic sources, so you can better understand the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
- Email click tracking allows you to measure the success of your email marketing campaigns and improve your conversions.
- Email click tracking can help you track each promotional offer and blog promotion in email campaigns.
Creating Your Click Tracking URL
One tool that helps you quickly create URLs that you can track the clicks of is the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder. It helps you add trackable campaign information to your URLs (that you add in your email), to measure statistics in your custom campaigns.
There are 4 areas you must complete:
- Website URL: This is where you enter the URL of your landing page.
- Campaign ID: Provide something meaningful (maybe the campaign name and time period).
- Campaign Source: Without question, enter “Email”.
- Campaign Name: I prefer to use a shortened title of the landing page (so I can better see which campaign I’m looking at later).
Once you’ve added your information, a URL with tracking parameters will automatically generated, and provided. It will be displayed in the “Share the generated campaign URL” section.
In fact you can do much more, not only tracking email clicks, but also social media engagement, ads, and more. Check out the video below for a more robust explanation, which includes tracking other events and multiple email campaigns.
Alternatives to GA4 for Email Analytics
One tool that can be used to track email clicks is called Bit.ly. Bit.ly is a URL shortening service that also provides analytics on the shortened URLs. This can be helpful in understanding where clicks are coming from and provides data on how many people clicked on the link, from where, and when.
Another alternative is to use a third-party email marketing service that provides analytics on email clicks. For example, MailChimp’s service includes click tracking in their email marketing plans.
A third alternative is to use Google Analytics’ built-in email campaign tracking feature. This can be done by adding a few parameters to the links in your email before you send them out.
Conclusion
Email analytics is a process that can help you understand email clicks and improve your email marketing conversions. By using Google Analytics or one of its alternatives, you can track email clicks and better understand your email marketing campaigns.
With Google Analytics 4, you can track email clicks and isolate email campaign traffic from other traffic sources. You can also use GA4 to measure the success of your email marketing campaigns and track each promotional offer and blog promotion in email campaigns.
Because GA4 also includes your website analytics, you can get a much larger picture (and better context) of the impact your email campaign provides, as you can easily reference it with statistics your ESP (email service provider) would not have.
Alternatives to GA for email analytics include tools like Bit.ly and third-party email marketing services that also help track analytics on email clicks. You can also use Google Analytics’ built-in email campaign tracking feature by adding a few parameters to the links in your email before you send them out.
You can learn much more about email analytics by visiting our Small Business Email Marketing posts. As well as find out more specific things about Email Analytics.