Tracking for Dollars

The other day I was telling one of my clients how excited I get by tracking email. I was like oh man I LOOOOVE email tracking. He laughed a laugh that said, “man this guy is a total nerd.” But then he said…”I’m starting to love it too.”

You know why? Because tracking response to email is a sure fire way to make more money.

Aside from that, it’s also a way to test how creative you can be in writing your copy, placing links, figuring out what to put in the email and what to put on the page that the link goes to.

Bring on the basics

To go on the email tracking expedition, you’ll need to:

1. Set up Google Analytics on your site. If you haven’t done this, do it NOW!
2. Bookmark this URL or just remember to Google Search URL Tool
3. Have an HTML email program – it’s part of the Topspin software but you can also use Mail Chimp, Constant Contact or Fanbridge just to name a few.
4. A little extra creativity!

The basics of what we are about to do is called “split testing.” Most HTML email programs – including Topspin’s will give you information like how many people opened the email, how many people clicked on links.

When you look at your Google Analytics, you see totals for how many visitors came to your site, how many pages they viewed and if you are using Topspin and you have Ecommerce Tracking enabled in your Google Analytics, you can also see what percentage of visitors purchased something and on average how much per purchase are you making.

So far so good! So let’s say you send an email out to your fans and there is a link to yoursite.com. When you check google analytics, you’ll probably see a spike in traffic on the day of and day after your email went out. So the spike is from people who got your email and then clicked the link.

But you won’t be able to track those people as separate from people who just went to your site. To Google Analytics, a person who clicks on a link you sent in an email looks just like a person who just typed your website address and went there directly.

This is why Google also offers the ability to create what I called “tagged links.” If you create a tagged link, then Google Analytics is able to separate those people from the general traffic to your site.

This means that now, you can see more exactly how much of that traffic spike was from your email AND you can see how much revenue can be attributed to the people you emailed.

Here is how to set it up:

Tag it!

Go to this URL where Google offers a simple tool to build a tagged link – but you may want to keep these instructions open as I’m going to walk you through what is going on when you are setting up your Tagged link.

So we’re out to track people who are clicking on links we put into our email. Let’s say the email is promoting our new album.

So We are the source of the promotion, and we’re promoting our album and we’re sending out our promotion via email.

Google requires at least these three bits of information: the Source the Medium and the Campaign.

We’re the Source, Email is the medium and the Campaign is the album promotion.

So in the tool, put “us” or your band name in the field labeled “Source” put “Email” into the field for Medium and put the name of your album into the “Campaign” field.

Now generate URL. You should get something like this:

http://mysite.com/?utm_source=us&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=albumname

where mysite.com would be your website address.

Now- let’s put it to use!

Here is where you go in Google Analtyics:

White belt: You just put the same link in every email. Like hey our new record is out you can listen here. Where the word “Here” is linked like http://mysite.com/?utm_source=us&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=albumname

Brown Belt: If you have more than one link in your email, you give them separate tags. For example you hyper link an Image in your email in addition to the word “here.”  What we’re doing is introducing another Variable — the source, medium and campaign are the same but now we want to know what happens to Image clickers vs. Text clickers.

Go to the URL tool and now generate two URLs – for the text, put the word text into the Content field. In the other put Image.

Your URL now looks like this:

http://mysite.com/?utm_source=us&utm_medium=email&utm_content=text&utm_campaign=albumname

and

http://mysite.com/?utm_source=us&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Image&utm_campaign=albumname

In Google Analytics you can compare data from the two. More on that below….

Black Belt: Carve your email list into two or three lists. Now write different emails to each list.

Maybe one email is long, the other is short. Maybe one is all text the other is just a huge graphic. Try lots of different things. Use the content parameter to let yourself know that someone has clicked on email A versus email B. You’re tracking not just how many clicks, but you’re really looking for what people do once they get on your site.

Your long email could have every link to your site like this:

http://mysite.com/?utm_source=us&utm_medium=email&utm_content=longemail&utm_campaign=albumname

Your short email would use a link like this:

http://mysite.com/?utm_source=us&utm_medium=email&utm_content=shortemail&utm_campaign=albumname

Ninja: Take that information and DO SOMETHING with it! If email A got more clicks than email B, but the people who clicked from email A didn’t buy as much. Then you need to come up with a theory as to why that is. Once you have a hypothesis of why it is, you create an experiment. Change something about the email, or the page you send a person to when the click. Use the tracking links to discover if your hypothesis was right. Did your change increase the behavior you are looking for?

Here is the making money part: If the behavior you are after is more revenue per visitor, then that is what you are testing for.

*note* In addition to installing Google Aanlytics you also need to enable E-Commerce tracking in your Analytics account. Just below the Google Logo, you’ll see a link for “Analytics Settings.” Click that, then click “Edit” on the next screen – it will be all the way on the right, middle of the screen in the column labeled “actions.”

Once you’ve done that, you go to the Traffic area in your analytics:

Click on Traffic Sources and from the sub-menu under Traffic Sources click “Campaigns”.

Now see that you have a little drop down just above where all your campaigns are listed that lets you drill down into things like Medium, and Content:

Then you can select for Campaign, or Medium or Content and see the traffic.

Now click onto the ECommerce tab:

Be sure you’re not just looking for volume (ie number of sales). Your volume could very well depend on timing. More people will click through and be excited the day you announce your record vs. a few days later. You want to look for ratios.

OF the people who click What Percentage do this or that? The percentage shows you how efficient you are. There of course is a whole lot more to get into, but those will be other blog posts… the feedburner subscription at the top right is a good option so you don’t miss out.

If you are becoming more and more efficient then the next time you have volume you’ll be able to get more out of it. That is where the more dollars comes from.

I skipped to the bottom, can you just wrap this up in a few words?

Yes! Install Google Analytics. When you send out email messages (or any online promotion) that has links back to your site – tag the links with the URL Tool (google search URL TOOL).

Establish some kind of baseline. How responsive are people to your emails? To your other links?

Create tests to improve your baseline. Test them using the links. Iterate. Improve more. Have fun, be creative. Try stuff that seems crazy…then check your analytics to see if you are crazy like a fox, or just crazy.

Happy hunting!