How to track your newsletter performance with Google Analytics
by Guest
Newsletters are the most common form of digital marketing I have seen in the past years. I really don't know any website that doesn't send at least 1 newsletter a month, whether it's an ecommerce website, news website or a B2B presentation website. There are a lot of email marketing platforms, but the question is how profitable are these newsletters? Most platforms provide some form or analysis on the performance of each newsletter. Most providers can show you the numbers of emails sent, the number of users that opened your newsletter and the number of clicks in the email. Along with Google Analytics, you can see how impactful these newsletters are. I want to show you some hacks to dive deeper in analysing each part of your newsletter and improve your newsletter marketing. ## Analyse each section in the newsletter separate Most of the newsletter that I saw had several links in them so the best way to track them is to tag each link in a distinctive way using the Campaign Content parameter (utm\_content). If you do not know what UTM parameters are, please take a moment to read this article: Why should you tag your campaigns? Using the blog post above create your tagged link and add the &utm\_content=link1 OR &utm\_content=second banner OR &utm\_content=Discount banner (whatever works best for you when analysing the data) at the end. Here is an example: http://www.littledata.ro/?utm\\\_source=newsletter&utm\\\_medium=email&utm\\\_campaign=20%25off\*\*&utm\\\_content=banner1\*\* Here is a newsletter as part of a campaign named: "black friday2" with 3 banners in it. You can see from the data bellow that the top banner had the most clicks, but, in fact, the second banner is the only one that converted. This means that in the future we should move the second banner as a primary banner to have a higher visibility and in this way increase the number of transactions. 
You can tag all your links in the newsletter (the logo, banners, hyperlinks, products and so on) And see how each section is performing and what is driving the customers to click in the email. In a real email marketing platform, I strongly recommend searching the provider blog to see if they already support this in any way. Here is MailChimp solution for tracking the newsletter performance in Analytics. If the platform you are using does not support Google Analytics at the moment you can just build the URL with Google's URL builder or our simple Littledata URL builder and add it as you normal do in the newsletter. ## Track users on how they get on your website from a particular newsletter We've tested some hypotheses and the first one is to make a group of users in Google Analytics that come from a newsletter. The standard way is just to tag the newsletter with UTM parameters and create an audience based on that traffic. But to be more precise and go further with the analysis, we can add a new UTM parameter to all the links in the newsletter that contained the User ID. So now this traffic is not random but it's from a customer we've engaged with already and I do have historical data. The benefit of doing so is that, in an era of mobile devices and cross-device interactions, people read newsletters on the move and react or buy on different devices at different times as a result of the same campaign. You, as a marketer need to understand the cross-device movement and so I recommend that you read about this in the blog post: User Tracking To be able to track the activity of each individual user in your newsletter, you need to build a URL with a User ID parameter in it. This step is similar to the one before so you can add on to the URL you already built for your banners and add the unique identifier number of each client like this: http://www.mywebsite.com/?utm\\\_source=newsletter&utm\\\_medium=email&utm\\\_campaign=20%25off&\*\*userID=3D12345\*\* The User ID is generated by the platform you're using, so please take your time and find out if your email marketing solution supports this, along with the email address you've imported and the User Id from your back end. We use Intercom, where you can just add it into the link with a simple click, like this: 
The platform you're using might be different but if there is an option to import the User Id along with the email address then it is likely that your platform supports this in some way. Once you've added this to the URL, you can then set up a URL variable in Google Tag Manager to pick it up and set up a field with the pageview that will be sent to Google Analytics. For more information, here's how to set a field in Google Tag Manager. # Part 2 We will go further into newsletter tracking and try to get all important stats from Google Analytics such as emails sent and emails openings. The advantage to doing this is that for most digital teams, the people creating the newsletters are not necessarily the ones analysing the data. This can help bring the teams a more in-depth view into their work and also a new angle in analysing the newsletter. 
Before you go ahead and implement this, you should be aware of a few aspects and make some important decisions. First, will you all be using the same Google Analytics account? Since the newsletter opens will send a lot of visits to your Google Analytics account and most of them will be bounces (a high percent of users will not click on the newsletter to go to the website), take into consideration that using the same account will interfere with your existing data from the website. Second, you can create a new, separate account. If you choose to create a new account you need to find out, if you use user tracking, how to link the user activity with the user activity on the website. For Google 360 users this is simpler because they can join views, but for regular Google Analytics users, this might be a struggle. The third option, which I recommend, is to create a second Google Analytics tracking code and run it in parallel with the one you're currently using for the newsletter. Now, let's dive into how you can track email opening and email clicks. The usual Google Analytics script will not work for email clients. However, Google Analytics also includes event tracking which can be used through an embedded image pixel within the email body. Implementing the Google Analytics pixel provides great information like real-time tracking, browser and operating system details and demographics. Insert this snippet in the body of your email like this: **** ** … ** **** **….** **** **** **
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** **** Most of the newsletter platforms have an HTML editor, which you can find by searching the sign " **<>** " in the template. This will let you add in the body of your email. 
The URL image pixel looks might like this: **** Building the URL of the Google Analytics implementation can be done with Google Analytics tool named: Hit Builder. You can also test the URL in the tool and see the hit in real time in Google Analytics. You have two options when sending the openings: as an **event** or as a **custom metric.** Before you go ahead with the HIT Builder let's get familiar with the components of the URL: | | | | --- | --- | | **URL Component** | **Explanation** | | cm1=Custom metric | This can be cm1,cm2 etc based on what you've created as a custom metric | | tid=UA-12345678-1 | Your Google Analytics Tracking ID | | cid=User\_ID | A systematic tracking ID for the customer | | t=event | Tells Google Analytics this is an Event Hit Type | | ec=email | The Event Category helps segment various events | | ea=open | The Event Action helps specify exactly what happened | | el=recipient\_id | Event Label specifies a unique identification for this recipient | | cs=newsletter | Campaign Source allows segmentation of campaign types | | cm=email | Campaign Medium could segment social vs. email, etc. | | cn=Campaign\_Name | Campaign Name identifies the campaign to you | To see openings as a custom metric, you should first create a new custom metric in the Google Analytics admin interface named Email Opens. Log in to Google Analytics, and click on Admin. Select the Account and Web Property, and click on Custom Definitions under the Web Property column. Then click on Custom Metrics. 
In the next window, click on the New Custom Metric button, and give your custom metric a name, formatting type, minimum and maximum value, and make sure the box is checked for Active. 
You may also find some other benefits to using Google Analytics tracking this way over most email service provider (ESP) tracking. It provides great system information like real-time tracking, browser and operating system details, demographic information including location, and will even tie in nicely with your web reports. ## How To Use Your Results The event tracking results can be seen in Google Analytics right away. Below are some examples of where you can see reports within Google Analytics. Real Time Events of openings for the newsletter: 
GA events This report shows the tracking for opens of the emails sent. You can now see how long it takes for people to start opening the newsletter after you've sent them. With this information, you can compare it with past newsletters and see if people are opening it faster or slower, which helps you determine if the subject of the message is motivating enough. Also, you can see what times of the day get the most opens and plan your newsletter schedule around that information. ## User location With the user location, you can see where in the world people are opening the message you're sending. This can help you determine who your most active audience is and if you should start tailoring your content towards different nations. If you have access to a translation service, this would also be helpful to determine what languages would be beneficial to add to your marketing content. 
Google Analytics also has a guide, which I recommend to read as well: Email Tracking – Measurement Protocol.