When you think of Google Analytics, you think of measuring statistics for visitors to your site from search engines, pay-per-click, and direct referrals. But Google Analytics is designed to do a whole lot more, and works perfectly for measuring response from email campaigns!

Even if you use a really nice email marketing service like CampaignMonitor.com (my favorite) or iContact.com, which track clicks from your emails, it is still important to track the visitors from those emails in your Google Analytics, so you don’t get them mixed in with other sources and campaigns. Additionally, you can track conversions, navigation, and other important factors that help you to improve conversions.

Setting up Analytics tracking from your email campaign is really simple, you just need to include a few items in your email links and a few lines of javascript (provided below) on your landing page. Here’s an example, and then we’ll discuss each variable individually:

http://www.mysite.com/landingpage?medium=email

(cont'd) &source=Newsletter&campaign=12-23-2008+Newsletter

medium - Starting with the most general item, “medium” defines the delivery vehicle, the advertising medium, for your visitors. I recommend just using “email” and then no matter how many different email campaigns you send out, you can segment them all together by medium.

source - Getting to some more granularity now, “source” helps you separate out your different types of email campaigns. You may have varying types of emails going out, such as: Newsletters, Customer Service emails, Surveys, Announcements, etc. This variable lets you segment those together, so you can watch how your Newsletters or Surveys as a whole perform.

camp - This is the most specific variable (camp short for “campaign”) that should vary with each of your email campaigns that go out. If you had a newsletter for December, you may want to put “December+2008″ as the value, or if it was part of a promotional offer, “Winter+Sale”.

 
Now for the last step, you need to put these 3 lines of code into your Google Analytics Javascript. Here are the 3 lines to add:

pageTracker._setCampMediumKey("medium"); // medium
pageTracker._setCampSourceKey("source"); //source
pageTracker._setCampNameKey("campaign"); // campaign

 
After you put those three lines in in, your code should look something like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? 

(cont'd) "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + 

(cont'd) "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-85279-31");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
pageTracker._setCampMediumKey("medium"); // medium
pageTracker._setCampSourceKey("source"); //source
pageTracker._setCampNameKey("campaign"); // campaign
</script>

TIP: It won’t cause problems if you just put the 3 lines of code in site-wide, like if you use a template or include for your Analytics javascript.

Once you have the link ready and the code on your landing page, you’re ready to send off that next email campaign! Then you can harness the power of Google Analytics with your email campaigns to see how your recipients interact with your site and if they convert.

In a future post I’ll discuss how to analyze the data from your email campaigns using Google Analytics. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed so you can keep up with all the latest tips and help with Google Analytics!

Tracking visits to pages using AJAX (Web 2.0 stuff), Flash, and even downloads used to be difficult to track. Now with Google Analytics’ Event Tracking, you can track when people use different dynamic elements in AJAX, Flash, and more. It is still all JavaScript based, but Event Tracking lets you do way more than before.

I’ve discussed before the use of an “OnClick” event to track downloads or other actions, and Event Tracking works very similar to this. Here is an example:

onclick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Videos', 'Play', 'Baby\'s First Birthday');"

Instead of just putting in a fake name for a page, you can now put in a category, action, and a value. In the above example, the category is Videos, the action is Play, and the label is Baby’s First Birthday. No value was included, but a value could be valuable if you wanted to track how far a download went, or a long loading screen.

This is really a great step forward for Google Analytics, because now you can group these actions by categories and keep track of everything better. Interestingly, there is a ~500 event limit for each visitor.

I’m going to start playing with more event tracking now, and my next job is to see how it works with “Goals”.

I’ve found many casual analytics users don’t actually use Goals, when they really should, and could get a lot of great insight from them. Goals not only give you focus and can help your business/pursuits in general, but they also help you to keep track of what works and what doesn’t, based on what people actually choose to do. If you knew how many more people signed up for your newsletter or gave you a lead based on the keyword they typed to find you, that would help you  to focus your efforts on those keywords. If you knew what pages made more of your visitors sign up, buy something, or download something, you could work on other pages that don’t perform as well and follow the successful pages’ lead.

Setting up goals is super easy, especially in my super tutorial:

Super Goals Tutorial

1) Decide what your “Goal” will be. Here are some ideas:

    * Fill out form

    * Buy something

    * Download something

    * Add something to shopping cart

    * Click on a link

    * Do a search

2) On the main page of your sites, click on “edit” for the site you want to set up a goal on, and then find Goal 1 and click “Edit”.

3) Set Active Goal to ON. Always be sure to check this, I’ve gone days trying to figure out why no goal conversions came in, later to find out this was set to OFF.

4) Decide what type of match it will be. Essentially I just use “exact match” for most everything, so that’s where you should start.

5) For your goal URL you can do one of two things: (a) Put in an actual URL like “/somedir/thankspage.html” where thankspage.html is the page that only gets viewed if there was a conversion, or (b) for links, downloads, or other goals that don’t go to an actual content page, make up a name (make sure it doesn’t match an actual directory or page) like “/goal/download/”. If you make up a name (b) you’ll need to make sure to do step 5.

(Only do step 6 if you opted for option (b) in step 5 above)

6) Edit the page that has the link that you need to track being clicked and add the following code to the “a” tag:

onClick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/goal/download/');"

7) If there is a value to your goal (like $0.10 every click or sign up) then you can fill in “Goal Value”. Leave the rest for now, and click Save.

That’s it! There are some other options with funneling, but we’ll touch on that another time.

Now the fun begins where you get to watch your conversions come in. Just click on the “Goals” link on the left and you can view all sorts of stats revolving around your goals.

For all you bloggers, internet marketers, small business owners, affiliates, and anyone else with a website (and an iPhone), you’re going to love the new iPhone App “Analytics”. Soon you can check your Google Analytics on your iPhone wherever you are, and go in depth to see what keywords people are hitting you with today, what your most popular content page is, and other analytics of your website, all on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

If you are like me, at least once a day you have a spare moment to check something on your iPhone, now you can check your site stats! The Analytics iPhone app is beautifully designed to make checking your stats a better experience than on your computer!

Stay tuned as the Analytics iPhone App for Google Analytics is officially announced!