Using Google Analytics

VerticalResponse Google Analytics Link Tracking

If you use Google Analytics to track your visitors’ interactions with your website, you can also integrate your VerticalResponse email campaigns data.  This will give you even more information as to the performance of your email marketing and what visitors are doing after they click within your email message.  If you do not have a Google Analytics account yet, you can sign up for your free Google Analytics account here: www.google.com/analytics.

The following instructions are assuming that you already have your Google Analytics account set up and placed the tracking code on your website.  Follow the steps below to do a one- time setup of your account and then learn how to turn it on or off for each of your email campaigns.

Step 1: Enabling Your VerticalResponse Account


To integrate Google Analytics with VerticalResponse, go the Settings icon in the top right of the VerticalResponse account page. 

Select Google Analytics Link Tracking from the Settings menu. 

Here’s where you will sign into your Google Analytics account and, more importantly, enter your domains to be tracked. Use the “Add a Tracked Domain” link to add your website address(es).  For example, if we were to track our own website, we would just enter “www.verticalresponse.com” in the text boxes like you see here.

Once you’ve entered all of the domains you want to track, make sure to click “Save Domains” at the bottom of the page. There is no limit to the number of domains you can track.  The system will not track domains that are not listed here.  Once you have enabled your domain(s) in your VerticalResponse account, the Google Analytics parameters can be added to your links within your email messages.


Step 2:  Set up Email Campaigns to be Tracked

You will need to specify for each email campaign whether you want Google Analytics tracking on it or not.  You do so on the page where you select which contacts and the time you want the email sent.  On the bottom of this page, click the box next to "Yes, I want to track email with Google Analytics." 

Next, select which merge fields will be used in the Google Analytics content parameter. Select the fields by clicking on the drop down box.

Google Analytics allows for the passing of 5 parameters in the URLs in your email campaign. These parameters will help you slice your data in various ways on the Google Analytics site. Here are the parameters that VerticalResponse will automatically tag onto your URLs:

• Source: VerticalResponse
• Medium: Email
• Campaign: {the subject line of your campaign}
• Keyword: {the link’s click text, or a generic placeholder in the absence of such} NOTE: By always using click text, especially where images are concerned, you will have a more specific value for keyword than the generic placeholder we will assign it.

For example, if you sent a campaign with the subject line of “Check out our Summer Specials”, the campaign parameter in your Google Analytics account will display as “check_out_our_summer_specials”.

Select other parameters to be passed to Google Analytics in the drop down box.

Step 3:  View Your Results

After your email campaign is delivered, login into your Google Analytics account to see how many people clicked from the email message to your website or landing page. You can view this in Google Analytics under “Acquisition” and then under “Campaigns”.  The subject line of your email campaign will be listed here. Please note that it may take over 24 hours for the data to appear in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics provides dozens of canned reports and dashboard elements that you can use to create sophisticated marketing reports. You’ll find reports with geographic overlays, viewing time spent per page, pages viewed per visit, bounce rates and tons of other options.