Email Campaign is the cheapest and easiest way to reach your target audience.  You can come up with an amazing email campaign, but what is the point if you are not tracking the results such as Open Rate and Clicks?  Without tracking results, how are you supposed to know whether the campaign was a success or a fail?  Are people even opening your email and clicking on the link to your website or promotion?

There are obviously a lot of paid services that provide tools to help you track your email campaign.  However, this guide will teach you a FREE way to create a custom link and track it with Google Analytics.

Generate Custom URL

Google Analytics provides a tool called URL Builder to help you generate custom link for your campaign so that you can track.  Visit Google Analytics URL Builder.

Fill out the required fields and click on Generate URL

Include the custom URL you generated from Google Analytics URL Builder in your emails and start tracking!

How to Track Email Campaign

Log into your Google Analytics account

If you have more than one website linked to your account, choose the site that you entered in Step 1 in the Google Analytics URL Builder form

Select the Standard Reporting Tab and then Advanced Segments tab under Visitors Overview

On the button right hand corner of the drop down, select +New Custom Segment

Enter a name for this new segment that you are creating.

In the Green box with the drop down arrow, choose Campaign and select Exact Matching in the box next to it.  Enter the campaign name you used in Step 2 of the Google Analytics URL Builder form.

Save the Segment.  Next time you visit Google Analytics, you will be able to select this segment from the advanced segment section and only view data for this campaign.

BONUS:

You can also use this tracking system not only for Email Campaigns but also for your Social Media campaigns.  If you want to gather data on the number of visits and unique visitors you get from your Social Media campaign, you can follow the above steps but instead post the link on your social media platforms and not on your emails.

For certain Social Media campaigns, you might want to shorten the link (i.e. Twitter).  Shorten links will help you save characters for your 140 character limited tweet.

You can use the following three free URL Shortener service

Google URL Shortener

Bit.ly

TinyURL

For Facebook, you might want to include the full link.  Facebook allows a longer status update; therefore, the length of the link wouldn’t matter.  Furthermore, by including a full link, the viewers will at least get some sort of clue where the link will be linking them to.  It helps build trust.