Standard tracking

To learn more about contact behaviour you can add tracking parameters to all links in your sendouts to follow any activity on your site. There are two ways of doing this, one is to use the standard tracking parameters, which this article is about, and the other is to add custom parameters.

The standard tracking paramaters have a preset of tracking parameters matching the selected tracking platform and these are not editable. If you want to customize your own parameters you should use custom tracking instead, please read this article to learn more.

Carma is supporting standard tracking to a few different systems and this is an overview of what they do and how they work.

  • Google Analytics
  • Webtrends
  • Xiti
  • Adobe Sitecatalyst (Former Omniture Sitecatalyst)
  • Adform

To activate any of these tracking extensions, login to your account and go to Account Settings > Tracking.

 

Google Analytics

When you are activating Google Analytics tracking, a new setting will be added to each email you are creating. You can choose to turn on and off Google Analytics tracking for each email you are creating.
Remember that you need Google Analytics implemented on your website to make this work.
Please check out http://www.google.com/analytics/

The concept

Tracking email campaigns in Google Analytics is done using a process called link tagging. This process is the manipulation of the links in your emails.
Here’s a sample link that might appear in an email:
http://www.mysite.com/page.php

To track it with Google Analytics it would be modified like this:
http://www.mysite.com/page.php?utm_campaign=12345_Newsletter1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=NewsletterRecipientsSE-All_recipients

And another email link that looks like this:
http://www.mysite.com/page.php?prodid=100

Should be modified like this:
http://www.mysite.com/page.php?prodid=100&utm_campaign=12345_Newsletter1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=NewsletterRecipientsSE-All_recipients

When someone lands on your site after clicking on a tagged link, GA removes the information from the URL and stores it in a cookie. Because the info now resides on your machine (in the cookie) GA can associate all visitor actions (like conversions and transactions) with the email.

How Link Tagging Works

What is all that info I added to the URL? They’re called link tagging parameters. The name of the parameter is on the left side of the equal sign and the value of the parameter is on the right side.
Each parameter represents a different attribute of your email.
Looking at the example above we can identifiy the following parameters and their values:

utm_campaign=!!DeliveryID!!_!!DeliveryName!!
utm_medium=email
utm_source=!!ListName!!-!!MasterSegment!!
utm_content=!!LinkName!!

Each one is identified by the Google Analytics tracking code and helps GA understand that the visitor arrived on your site via an email.

utm_campaign

This parameter identifies the name of your email campaign and the numeric ID of your email in Carma.

utm_medium

The medium parameter describes how the message got the to visitor. Carma adds the value “email”. Using a single value consolidates all email generated traffic into a single line item in the reports.

utm_source

This is where things get interesting. Traditionally, in link tagging, the source is the ‘who’ attribute. It describes who you’re working with to push a message out to. The ‘who’ is the segment you are using for the article your link was in. So if you are not segmenting a specific article, the source of the link in that article will be “All_recipients”, but if you segmented the article, the link(s) in that article will get a source that equals the name of the used segment.  (Like a specific gender segment, age segment of purchase history segment). For example, some potential utm_source values might be:

utm_source=NewsletterRecipientsNO-All_recipients
utm_source=NewsletterRecipientsNO-Everyone_clicked_a_specific_link_in_earlier_email
utm_source=NewsletterRecipientsNO-City=Stockholm
utm_source=NewsletterRecipientsNO-purchase:last-60-days
utm_source=NewsletterRecipientsNO-purchase:free-shipping-offer

The key here is that by identifying the segment in the utm_source parameter you’ll be able to measure the performance of that segment in GA. You are segmenting your email list, right?

utm_content

Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL. To add utm_content to your links please use the “name” field in the inspector when editing your link.