Brett Meyer, NTEN

You may already know you can use Google Analytics to track your Google AdWords campaigns. Makes sense: Google would integrate puppies into their products if they thought it would help. [Ed. note: Actually, they have.]

Because they had to standardize the system used for this tracking, you can co-opt it for your own purposes to track click-throughs from your e-mail campaigns, banner ads, links in blog posts, even paper mailings (if you use it in conjunction with a URL shortener like bit.ly). I've been to a few presentations that referenced doing this, and seen it mentioned on a blog here and there, but haven't come across much concrete information on how actually to implement it. Turns out, it's really easy.

Generate the Tracking URL 

Awhile back, I wrote about tracking click-throughs using query strings. Forget the technical details, because Google provides a tool you can and should use to create the tracking links for you. Bookmark the page.

It won't take you much longer to create these special URLs than it does to insert links in your messaging campaigns already. The key is to remain consistent.

• In the "Website URL" box, enter the landing page you want to send folks to.
• For "Campaign Source", I generally enter the origin of the message -- our CRM (netforum), blog, a partner's web site, etc.
• "Campaign Medium" is the type of message, such as email, banner ad, or, if you're daring, post card.
• I don't use "Campaign Term", but don't let that stop you.
• "Campaign Content" should be used identify any segment you might be using. In the screen above, "comm_mem_act" refers to Communications staff who are Members of NTEN and active in our community. Remember, it doesn't matter what you use to code this, as long as you stay consistent over the long term.
• Finally, use "Campaign Name" much like the "Campaign Content" field, to let you sort and differentiate the data (we'll get to that, below). In the above example, I'd be tracking a message about one of our Roundtable Discussions.
• Click "Generate URL", and use the result as the hyperlink in your messaging campaign. See, easy!

Now, let's take a look at how to track the results after you've launched your campaign.

Find the Data in Google Analytics 

Log-in to your Google Analytics account, and find the "Campaigns" header under "Traffic Sources":

You'll see something like this:

Everything tagged with Google's campaign codes is lumped onto this screen, so you'll have to sort the information to make it useful. Fortunately, the pivot tables make it easy -- and you don't even have to care what a "pivot table" is.

Just use the two dropdown menus above the table to sort your data. Here, I've sorted by "Campaign" and "Ad Content" (two of the variables you set when you create the URL):

Now we're getting somewhere. You can see that the e-mail we sent out about our IT Staffiing Report brought in a lot of traffic, and that NTEN Members (the "mem" code) spent more time interacting with our site. There's more, of course, but you can make it easier to use with a little filtering.

On this screen, I've filtered for any campaign tagged "drupal" -- from a message about a series we ran on the Drupal CMS:

Now there's some potentially useful data! For example:

• Active IT Staffers who are Members of NTEN were clearly the most interested in this content -- not just by sheer visits, but by their Pages per Visit and Average Time on Site.
• Non-member IT Staffers who are NOT active in our community stuck around for awhile, too. That's good to know for future outreach and programming decisions.
• Meanwhile, Communications Staff who are Members but not active in the community didn't much care about this content: check out their bounce rate compared to some of the other segments.

Don't forget to compare all of these numbers and statistics to some of your other data, including the number of messages sent, open rates, and the like. You can even export Google Analytics data to Excel to combine and resort the information.

Let's resort again. Thanks to the (invisible) magic of pivot tables, I can swap the sort criteria, so it looks at "Ad Content" first, and then "Campaign":

In this example, I've sorted on "comm" to find all of the messages sent to our Communications Staff segment. This way, we can try to figure out which of our programming may appeal to which segment. Looks like our Members are far more interested (or educated about?) YouTube than the non-members on our lists. Read into that what you will.

I'll leave it to you to poke around in Analytics to see how far you can push this with your own campaigns. Happy tracking!