Have you ever wondered if people are really interested in what you have to say and the emails you’re sending them?
In this article I’m sharing a different way to use Google Analytics to track how people are interacting with your emails, without having to use a stand alone email platform.
This can be really useful if you are outreaching and starting conversations with potential new customers and want to know if they are visiting your website so you can focus on your time and energy on your warmest contacts.
A large proportion of my time as a new business owner is networking, starting conversations with people to understand how I might help them. For me, this usually starts with a phone call followed up with an email, driving people to my site to enable them to find out more about what I do.
I wanted to know if people were actually interested in what I had to say and if they were interacting with my email and visiting my site. So I decided to use Google analytics to help..
Not many people know you can use this for more than website tracking – so today I’m sharing how to use it to track who’s clicking on your outreach emails, so you can see which of your leads to follow up first and increase your conversion rate from calls to clients.
Using Google analytics to track off site activity
Google analytics is a very powerful tool, but many SMEs are just not using it as they either don’t have the time or don’t know where to start.
This article will tell you if a contact has interacted with your email. I find this useful as I can see who of the people I have contacted are most interested in talking to me, I can then be more specific with my follow up calls and increase my conversion rate from calls to enquiries.
All you need to do is create a specific link in Google analytics, which I’m going to walk you through below step by step.
How to create a Google tracking link
This is really easy to do and Google have taken the hard work out of it by creating a URL builder – Campaign URL Builder — Google Analytics Demos & Tools (ga-dev-tools.appspot.com)
The link created would look something like this… https://greenopal.co.uk?utm_source=call&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tony
You can see how it is broken down below, in this instance I am contacting the lovely “Tony” so that is the name that I have added to the campaign.
When Tony clicks on the email to visit the site I can see within Google Analytics that he has visited.
| Url | Source | Medium | Campaign |
| https://greenopal.co.uk | Calls | Tony |
You don’t want to let customers see this link so use a text link in your email to hide it.
To do this link specific text in your email and hit the link button in your email.
So what now?
To see if customers have been clicking on your email, go into Google analytics, acquisition, campaigns, all campaigns.
Activity from your email will be listed there.
So what?
With this information you can see which contacts have responded to your email and can gauge their interest level and change your communications towards them next time you contact them.
And better communications = more conversions 🙂
If you would like to understand Google analytics a little more and how it can help you grow your business, get in touch gemma@greenopal.co.uk