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In our article on Google Analytics, we discussed how you can bring together your email analytics with your website usage statics to get a more complete picture of your online customers.

In this article, we give you some tips on how to get started with Google Analytics.

Creating Google Analytics trackable links

First you'll need to have a Google Analytics account. Setting up an account is quite simple and if you don't have one yet, we strongly encourage you to get one.

Next visit the Google URL Builder web page and fill in the form. Where the form asks for your Website URL, type in full web address to the page you want your subscribers to visit when they click on the link in your email message.

For the tracking to work, you must provide information about the Campaign Source and Campaign Medium. All the other fields in the form are optional.

What to enter

• Campaign Source
  This is the name of your email list, so if you're running more that one email list you can see the results for each one separately.
• Campaign Medium
  This is always email when you're creating trackable links for your email messages.
• Campaign Term
  You can leave this blank
• Campaign Content
  This describes how the link is used, so if you have both a text link and an image link to the same page in your email you can see results for each separately.
• Campaign Name
  This is the name of your campaign, so that you can track how different email lists respond to the same campaign.

An example

Let's say we want to create a campaign that offers a special price on SPF8 sunscreen that we're calling Sun Smart 8.

We've changed the product pricing and description on our website and want to send out an email message to targeted customers that contains a link to this web page and encourage people to buy it online.

After looking through our email marketing statistics we might identify that one of our email lists (uvswimwear) contains people who have bought UV resistant swimwear from us in the last two years, and we also have a segment (uvaccessories) in another email list (infonights) of people who have attend our information evening ‘Protecting the ones we love’ which promoted UV resistant hats & sunglasses.

Our email message will contain a photo of a mother putting sunscreen on her happy son and will be a link to our web page. We also have a written call to action that contains a link to the web page.

Here's how the form would be completed (depending on how we set up the various links to the website content).

1. Sending to our email list, uvswimwear, with the photo as the link.
   
   Website URL: http://www.aquabubswimwear.com.au/ss.asp?item=2655
   Campaign Source: uvswimwear
   Campaign Medium: email
   Campaign Term:
   Campaign Content: imagelink
   Campaign: sunsmart8
   


2. Sending to our email list, uvswimwear. The link is in our description.
   
   Website URL: http://www.aquabubswimwear.com.au/ss.asp?item=2655
   Campaign Source: uvswimwear
   Campaign Medium: email
   Campaign Term:
   Campaign Content: textlink
   Campaign: sunsmart8
   


3. Sending to our segment, infonight_uvaccessories. Photo is the link.
   
   Website URL: http://www.aquabubswimwear.com.au/ss.asp?item=2655
   Campaign Source: infonight_uvaccessories
   Campaign Medium: email
   Campaign Term:
   Campaign Content: imagelink
   Campaign: sunsmart8
   


4. Sending to our segment, infonight_uvaccessories. The link is in our description.
   
   Website URL: http://www.aquabubswimwear.com.au/ss.asp?item=2655
   Campaign Source: infonight_uvaccessories
   Campaign Medium: email
   Campaign Term:
   Campaign Content: textlink
   Campaign: sunsmart8
   

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