It was the best of times…it was the worst of times. Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful and robust website analytics tool and, best of all, it is free! Unfortunately, for marketers that specialize in acquisition email efforts especially, all of the traffic doesn’t show up all the time. And, in particular with commercial email traffic, it can be as low as <20%.
This can be a difficult conversation to have with advertisers that are unused to the relationship between bulk email and site analytics, so it is important to identify upfront if an advertiser is particularly sensitive to site analytics issues. Other methods of traffic validation can be employed to help to mitigate skepticism and prevent the need for post-campaign explanations. The same message delivered post-campaign might be perceived as defensive, or worse evasive, so I urge you to be proactive with this discussion.
Other methods of traffic validation might include:
– click details from the email platform (date/time stamp, click url, ip address and even email address if able to be shared)
– server logs (pulled directly from the advertisers’ website hosting, these show all visits’ details. Data available varies, but many include: date/time stamp, url, ip address)
– clone a landing page for use only by the email campaign (this isolates the acquisition email traffic, so any visits or conversions can be attributed by those broadcast(s))
– 3rd party click tracking (though the quantity of clicks can be unreliable with acquisition email traffic as well, the dates/time and proportion of click activity seems to be OK and this is something that can be set up without advertiser assistance)
Does your traffic show up, but you aren’t sure that you’re interpreting it properly? Check out this article for some common mistakes that marketers make, You are doing Google Analytics wrong. Here is why