Stat tracking for bulk email and email blast campaigns can be a bit tricky.

Previous versions of Google Analytics could be used to track response rates of email marketing, but that function was disabled long ago.

To understand why, you have to understand how emails are tracked.

The way most email response tracking works is by embedding a small tracking pixel inside the email or by using s script.

When an email is opened, the pixel is requested from the server or the script is run.  This pings the server which sent the email and creates a track-able event.

When you dynamically insert the pixel or code, you can track down the the user level to see who opened.

The links inside the email are also dynamically generated and coded to be unique to each recipient, which allows for click tracking.

The tracking problem most people have is that once some one clicks, they can’t identify what that user is doing on the website.

Steps to Ensure Email to Web Site Tracking

You must hand code your URLs for your stat system.

If you are using Google Analytics that means using the tracking url building tool.  This allows you to overide the default script that GA uses to figure out where someone came from.

This is extremely important for email marketing because each email client will look different to Google Analytics.  If you don’t use this tool, here is what people will likely show up as.

• Users from Gmail will show up as referrals from mail.google.com
• Users from Yahoo will show up as xxxxx.yahoo.com
• Users from Hotmail will show up as xxxx.hotmail.com
• Users who use Outlook will show up as direct traffic
• and so on

This creates a major data scattering problem which will make result tracking of people who came in thru email completely impossible.

By placing properly coding your URLs inside your email messages you will be able to track the actual response rates of your campaigns.  If you want to get really sneaky, you can dynamically insert your customers customer number or email address inside the tracking email.  The dynamic text insertion will vary depending on who you use to send your emails.

Here is an example of a tracking link sent from my email marketing service provider, Vertical Response

http://www.auradev.com/aprilspecials.php?utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_medium=email&utm_content=customerID&utm_campaign=april-newsletter

When I go into analytics the people who click that link will show up under Source > VerticalResponse and Medium > email

I also might dynamically insert the customerID from my list if I wanted to see what any particular user did on my website after clicking the link.

The april-newsletter would show up as a campaign, so that if I send a newsletter each month, I could compare the results of each newsletter separately.