Seeing the bigger picture

Google Analytics is a free tool that can be used to measure and report on traffic to your website.

If you have a Google Analytics account setup for your site, you can also use it to track visitors coming in from the links in your email newsletters sent with MailAway. 

In conjunction with MailAway's own reporting, that can give you a very powerful way of determining what your customers are interested in, what they look at and where you can improve. Linking your email campaigns to your Analytics account couldn't be easier - we do it for you!

Once you've sent your first campaign with Google Analytics integrated, it's time to log into your analytics account and check out the results.  Below we're getting you started with some of the basic how tos with Analytics. 

• Finding the specific campaign
• Basic overview of the campaign
• Tracking goal conversions
• Tracking sales

Drilling down to your specific campaign

To get started, click on "Traffic Sources" in the navigation on the left, and then click "Campaigns". This will display a list of all the campaigns that you've sent using tracking. This might include those sent with MailAway, a banner ad you've been tracking or clicks from a Google Adwords campaign.

In the example below, I want to see the results for the "April Newsletter" I just sent, highlighted in yellow. Click on that campaign to drill down to the results.

   

Basic overview of a campaign

Once you click on your campaign name, you're taken to a basic overview of the results so far, including the number of visits your campaign generated, the average number of pages viewed and plenty more. Here's what it looks like.

Tracking goal conversion

The reports in Google Analytics really start to shine when you set up the reports to reflect what you're trying to get out of your website. The main way of doing this is by setting up "Goals". For example, a goal might be to get a subscriber to download a whitepaper, complete a contact form, or even buy something.

Google Analytics lets you set up to 4 goals (each with multiple steps called "funnels" if you need to get really specific) in each account. For a complete walkthrough on setting up goals, Google has put together a great guide here. Assuming you've set some goals up, you can see if any subscribers completed these goals by clicking on the "Goal Conversion" tab, next to "Site Usage". Clicking that will display a report like the one pictured below.

Google Analytics also has a great feature that lets you assign a value to each goal. So, even if you're not actually selling something directly through your site, you can still generate estimates of the return on investment for your campaign based on the number of goals you convert. Here's a quick explanation of what we mean:

"A good way to value a goal is to evaluate how often the visitors who reach the goal become customers. If, for example, your sales team can close 10% of people who request to be contacted, and your average transaction is £500, you might assign £50 (i.e. 10% of £500) to your 'Contact Me' goal."

You can read more about goal values in the Google Analytics help center.

Tracking sales

If you run an e-commerce site of any kind, then you can accurately track exactly how many sales each campaign resulted in. You can turn on the e-commerce component of Google Analytics by editing the settings for that site, like in the screenshot below. Here's a detailed walkthrough on how to go about tracking your sales data using Google Analytics.

To access the sales results for your campaign, click on the "E-commerce" tab (which will be visible as soon as you enable the e-commerce component like we explained above). This page shows you exactly how much revenue has been generated as a result of your email campaign, the number of transactions, the per pound value of each visitor and more. It's really juicy data that you are going to love!