Encode hyperlinks for Google Analytics
by Coen Vermeer
Copernica offers you insights in the
Why should you encode hyperlinks for Google Analytics?
A lot of marketers use Google Analytics as their website statistics package. Google Analytics is free but offers a large amount of information and functionality. By adding a bit of extra (measuring) code to the hyperlinks in your newsletter, visitors and conversion will not be measured as 'direct traffic' in Google Analytics. But they will be appointed to a specific campaign which you created.
How to encode your hyperlinks?
Add a source ('Copernica'), a medium ('Email') and a campaign name (for example, 'Newsletter-apr-2011') to all hyperlinks you include in an email. Furthermore, you use a content element indicating which specific hyperlink it concerns. For example, when using a clickable image and a text link in the intro text of an article of your newsletter. If both of them refer to the same page on your website, the content element will help you determine what works best.
Where can you retrieve your results?
As soon as the campaign starts, you can find the collected data in Google Analytics. In the menu 'Traffic Sources' and in submenu 'Campaigns' you will find the name of the campaign that you used in the hyperlink, being 'Newsletter-apr-2011' in this example. It is possible to specify the results per source, medium and content element from there on.
