Tracking email acquisition effectiveness with Google Analytics

Intro

Lately I built an app which could be interesting for others too. Therefore I decided to do some marketing and sent an email to possible users.

As I am newbie in marketing I had to track its effectiveness to know what I should improve in the email. How is it possible to analyze user's behavior on emails? Well, with Google Analytics. ;)

First of all you need to add Google Analytics on your app. This depends on your tech stack, therefore I won't explain it and focus on the email.

E-Mail

Let's assume this is our first draft and we want to send it to possible users.

Hi

Have you heard of Nice App? Well, now you have. ;)

You can do a lot of nice stuff with it. Check it out on nice-app.com.

Best regards

If the user clicks on the URL we will see some visitors. But we still don't know from where they came and which version of the email they received. Let's improve it!

Google Analytics UTM Params

Google Analytics offers some URL parameters we can use. In my case I used the following four:

• utm_campaign = "launch"
• utm_medium = "email"
• utm_source = "acquisation"
• utm_content = "version_1"

Improved version

We can use these params and add it to the URL. Google Analytics will automatically track them for us.

?utm_source=acquisition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=launch&utm_content=version_1

Hi

Have you heard of Nice App? Well, now you have. ;)

You can do a lot of nice stuff with it. Check it out on nice-app.com?utm_source=acquisition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=launch&utm_content=version_1.

Best regards

Conclusion

By using these UTM params we enhanced the URL and are now able to answer the following questions:

• How many times has the URL been clicked in the email?
• Which e-mail have they received?
• Which version have they received?

Google Analytics is very powerful and by using it we are able to track the effectiveness of our emails.

Let me know your opinion!