To evaluate the effectiveness of an automation, you can use UTM tags. These are parameters added to a link. A link for tracking can be inserted anywhere: in emails, contextual advertising ads, or in social networks. With the help of Google Analytics, tags help to understand the customer's behavior on the website, their geolocation, and device type.
Here’s an example of a UTM tag. It is a part of the link after the question mark:
https://www.selzy.com/en/blog/keysy/email-and-orthopedy/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=trigger&utm_campaign=chrn_mainchain_b&utm_term=letter8
You can read Selzy’s complete guide to Google Analytics as an introduction to the service.
How to track the effectiveness of the whole automation
To apply tags to all the emails in an automation, in the automation editor, click on the gear in the top right corner. From the drop-down list, select Set utm tags.
Next, in the popped-up window, fill in the basic data for the UTM tag:
Channel. This tag is necessary to determine from what source the user accessed the website. The channel can be contextual advertising, social networks, messengers, email, or SMS. By default, the channel is set to email.
Source. In email campaigns, we specify their category: digest, promo, trigger, or automation for an automation sequence. By default, it is Selzy to indicate the email service provider.
Campaign. In this field, you can specify the name of the marketing campaign that the automation is part of. For example, the welcome series can be called new_regchain.
Now you need to send emails and wait for customers to click on the links. Then you can go to Google Analytics and view the automation data. It usually takes about three hours for the data to show up in Google Analytics.
To see statistics in Google Analytics, from the list on the left, select Acquisition → Traffic acquisition, then Session source / medium.
IMPORTANT!
To get correct data in Google Analytics, it is important not to use link-shortening services and websites with redirects. For example, do not use bitly.com, ow.ly, and other similar services. If you use them, the UTM tags will not work, as they will be attached to the redirector’s website link and not your website link.
If you must use link shorteners, create links with UTM tags already added to them. They can be added in advance using UTM link builders, for example, utmbuilder.net.
Adding UTM tags in advance using a UTM link builder:
For example, we will use the utmbuilder.net. As a target link, indicate the one you want to add UTM tags to and write the tags according to the proposed parameters. Then at the bottom of the page, you will see the link with tags. Copy the link.
Now this tagged link can be used in a link shortener without losing the ability to track it for statistics.
How to track the effectiveness of each email in automations
For more accurate statistics, tags can be specified for each email.
Let's imagine you want to understand which of the emails is ineffective and generates the least amount of traffic.
First, set up UTM tags for all emails, as described in the previous step. Next, open the automation editor, click on the pencil icon by the Send email action, and go to Additional settings by clicking on Show at the bottom right.
Now, tag the email. Assign a number to the email in the Keyword field. It can also be another identifier of your choice.
Fill in keywords for each email in the automation.
After the campaign is launched, we will be able to analyze the impact of each email and make conclusions.
In Universal Analytics (Google Analytics 3), select Source/Medium view from the Acquisition tab.
Here, you can see the two emails in the automation each had 1 user conversion, so the letter1 and letter2 campaigns were equally effective.
How to set up tracking of individual links in each email
Let's imagine you need to understand what works better: a link or a button with a call to action.
IMPORTANT!
If you want to individually track different links in an email and add UTM tags to each one of them, make sure you don’t have any tags for the whole automation. Otherwise, statistics or analytics tools may record incorrect data. Tags from the automation’s setting will be prioritized, while manually entered tags will be ignored.
To make different UTM tags for each link in an email, use a UTM builder, for example, this one. Fill in the UTM Content field with “link” or “button” for these link types in your email.
Once you assign UTM tags to the needed links, copy the links and paste them into the email.
