Landing Page Metrics

Google Analytics: Using Metrics to Track and Improve Email Marketing Results
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics (previously Urchin) has become one of the industry’s most powerful Internet marketing tools, helping advertisers, publishers, and Web site owners improve their sales conversion, campaign targeting, and marketing initiatives. It is a robust Web statistics software application provided by Google free of charge.
Google Analytics is simple and easy to use, and anyone can start benefiting from it in just a few minutes. Just add some basic code to your Web site, and you’re ready to begin monitoring visitor trends.
After basic setup, marketers can track important statistics like visitor referrers, navigation paths, pageviews, geo-location data, and browser type. Know where your visitors come from, whether referred by search engines, ads, emails, blogs or affiliates. Know which cities, states, and countries your primary visitor traffic comes from so you can more carefully target future ad campaigns.
Though it’s hugely popular with webmasters and usability professionals, some marketers have yet to realize the value Google Analytics plays when used to monitor email marketing campaigns. You can track, evaluate, and analyze results using colorful graphs and charts. Google Analytics makes it easier to identify trends, improve usability, and increase your return on investment.
Email Marketing Campaign Setup
Using Google Analytics, email marketers gain greater control over the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of each campaign by sending carefully targeted, relevant messages, improving revenue opportunities, and enhancing business reputation.
To get started, create a Google Analytics account by visiting www.google.com/analytics. Follow the directions provided to place tracking code onto the relevant Web site files. Once you’ve created a Google Analytics account and placed the provided code into your Web site, you’ll need to add parameters to URLs in each email marketing message. These denote which visitors arrive as a result of each email marketing campaign.
While some email marketing products add these parameters automatically, it takes just a few minutes to set it up manually.
Google Analytics looks for a few basic values in each link, namely the campaign source, campaign medium, and campaign name. To set up these values manually, simply change the parameter names shown in parentheses below:
- Campaign Source (utm_source). This identifies the name of your email marketing system, such as StreamSend. If you don’t use an email marketing system, you can label your campaign source “Email Marketing.”
- Campaign Medium (utm_medium). This identifies the campaign instrument used. In the case of email marketing, your medium is “email.”
- Campaign Name (utm_campaign). This identifies the name of your campaign. The Campaign Name helps you differentiate among various campaigns or unique messages within each. Most email marketers use their message subject line or other identifying value for this parameter.
Using this process, campaign managers can monitor inbound visitor traffic for any destination URL, whether a main Landing Page, a product page or other sub-page.
Example: Main Landing Page
- Before tagging: http://www.example.com/
- After tagging: http://www.example.com/?utm_source=StreamSend&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=My%2BEmail%2BSubject
Example: Sub-Page
- Before tagging: http://www.example.com/index.php?page=home
- After tagging: http://www.example.com/index.php?page=home&utm_source=StreamSend&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=My%2BEmail%2BSubject
Tracking Email Campaign Results
Once an email campaign is properly coded and delivered, Google Analytics automatically monitors resulting Web site traffic. Find out which links were most popular with your recipients, when they visited your Web site, how long they stayed, and where they navigated following arrival. Then adjust campaigns, body text layout, and other variables to improve results over time.
To view campaign results:
- Log into your Google Analytics account.
- On your Dashboard, click Traffic Sources.
- View your Top Traffic Sources, or click View Full Report to see all traffic sources.
- Locate and click the link identifying your email marketing Campaign Source. In our example above, your Campaign Source is your email marketing product: e.g., StreamSend, or “Email Marketing.”
On your Campaign Source page, Google Analytics provides details on the number of visitors generated by your campaign, the number of pages they visited, average time on your Web site, percent of new visitors to your Web site, and the average bounce rate.
Campaign managers can also drill down using the segments drop-down menu. This provides even greater detail on individual campaigns, keywords, geographic regions, browser types, operating systems, and visitor activity, such as the most popular landing and exit pages. Each results page provides the means to drill down even further and fine-tune your data.
Google Analytics dramatically enhances the abilities that e-commerce firms have in retaining and converting customers. Simply use the E-commerce tab to display purchase information to calculate ROI numbers for your campaigns.
Using Google Analytics, email marketers can discover simple ways to more effectively tailor their promotional messages, design and lay out to their audience’s preferences, minimize steps in the purchase process, reduce shopping-cart abandonment, improve landing-page effectiveness, and keep visitors on your Web site even longer by identifying and optimizing the weak links where most of your visitors exit.
Use today’s robust delivery and tracking tools, and make each message count.
Why You Shouldn’t Increase Online Traffic – 1 of 5
Everyone agrees on the need to increase online traffic, but lots of people don’t know of some preliminary steps. Without a proper web metrics system, you won’t be able to measure your marketing campaigns. A successful organic SEO expert puts web analytics in place for more clarity and satisfactory accomplishment before boosting website traffic.
The Role of Web Metrics in Increasing Online Traffic
Web metrics help you monitor, study and analyze your marketing efforts when you increase online traffic. It could give you lots of information regarding your recent marketing activities at your site. Such information could enlighten your path toward better marketing policies.
A web metrics system installed on your website could inform you of the following data:
* The increase in visitors’ interest in your site,
* The increase in your site’s geographical popularity,
* The increase in your indexation in search engines, and
* The increase in the interest in some of your content.
When you increase online traffic, you should become aware of how many new and repeat visitors are added to your monthly visitors, where they are originating from, which sites or search engines have sent you more visitors, and which one of your textual contents has attracted more attention.
Increased Online Traffic without Activating Web Metrics
Imagine you’ve managed to attract lots of traffic to your site through a particular method like article marketing, but you’d not installed any web metrics system to measure your results. Your marketing is a success, but you’re not sure how to repeat it. If it’s not a success, you don’t know how to prevent it.
Why is this the case? The answer is easy: You don’t know what the reasons are for your success or failure. You could increase online traffic, but you’re not sure where in the world people are more interested in your content. You don’t know why certain groups of visitors are coming to your site more than others. In addition, you have lots of other unanswered questions in your mind.
The core reason for your blind marketing is the lack of web metrics. It’s useless to increase online traffic without activating a proper web analytics system. So, this is the first step you should take before you begin your online marketing.
How to Increase Online Traffic using a Proper Web Metrics
A proper web metrics shows you where desirable amount of traffic originates from. It could be one of the following sources or a combination of them:
* The methods you apply to get new visitors,
* Some search engines (local or global),
* A particular website or directory,
* Some keyphrases,
* A specific web page,
* Some well-planned navigation routes,
* A better optimized landing page,
* And so on.
So, you can increase online traffic even more by enhancing those winning factors in your site or refraining from continuing other factors. Such enhancement could result in higher search engine ranking and better visibility to your target audience.
Web metrics helps you understand which country, region or city sends you more qualified traffic. So, you can concentrate your attention and efforts on the local search engines, directories, blogs, etc of that country, region or city.
Web metrics helps you find out which keyphrases need more emphasis while content creation and link building. Therefore, you’ll focus more on them next time or somewhere in your future marketing strategies.
A Meaningful Web Business with Web Metrics
To be successful in your online marketing campaigns, it’s compulsory to have some web metrics. Otherwise, you may increase online traffic without knowing what has played the key role in bringing high amount of targeted traffic to your website.
So, you shouldn’t increase online traffic without prior installation of a proper web metric system at your website source code. This is the initial step you should take before anything else to gain tangible reasons for the internet marketing performance.
About the Author
Rahman Mehraby is the Malaysia SEO Expert who helps your increase online traffic by applying organic SEO services to your websites. Check out his services and articles at: http://www.site-booster.com.
Google Landing Page Load Speed













