How to Track Email Campaigns with G-Lock Analytics
With G-Lock Analytics you can clearly understand what is happening to your email marketing campaigns after they are sent. When a recipient opens your email or clicks a link in your email message, this action is recorded and stored inside your personal account on our email tracking service. You can login to your account at any time and view the tracking statistics in the real time.
Each email is tracked using special links. When creating your email newsletter, you simply replace your links with special tracking links. Once such a link is clicked, click is counted by G-Lock Analytics. You also place a small image into the source of your HTML email. This small transparent image is used to track email opens.
To use G-Lock Analytics and collect tracking statistics, you need to create a user account on our email tracking service.
After your account is setup and activated, login to your account and download a redirect script. We suggest that you upload the redirect script to your website.
Placing a redirect script onto your website will allow you keep your brand in front of your recipients and not confuse them with a generic click tracking link such as http://www.safeclickpro.com/r.php. You don’t want to send subscribers to a third-party website. Links that go to a tracking domain may cause some recipients to not trust you and to not click through. If you upload a redirect script to YOUR website, tracking links will go through your own domain.
Adding Email Campaign to G-Lock Analytics
After you created an account and uploaded the redirect script to your website, you can add an email campaign to your account. An email campaign = email message you will send and track.
To add a campaign:
Login to your account
Click on Add Campaign button
Fill in the form:
Campaign Name - a name for your campaign (you can enter the subject of your email, for example)
Activity Period - the period of time during which the campaign will be active (i.e. G-Lock Analytics will collect email metrics for the campaign). By default G-Lock Analytics sets the end date to one month forward from the current date. You can change the end date yourself. It's recommended that you set the end date at least 2 weeks later than the start date because the peak of user activity usually falls to two first weeks after the email sending date.
Number of Recipients – enter the number of the recipients in your list.
Number of Bounced - if you process bounced emails, you can enter the number of bounces into this field after the email is sent.
Count Stats by IP address – check this box if you want to calculate opens and clicks by the user’s IP address. Only one open and one click from the same IP will be counted. If you don’t check this box, opens and clicks will be calculated based on the user’s email address.
Use merge tag – if you want to merge a field into the tracking link, for example, Email, check this box and type the field name in the format supported by the Merge option in your email sending program. Example: [Email], or %%Email%%, etc.
Important! Merging the Email field is required if you want to see the email addresses of the recipients who opened your message and who clicked on the link.
Use redirect script: – If you uploaded a redirect script to your website, check this box and type the URL of the redirect script on your website, for example: http://www.yourdomain.com/r.php
Active – Check this box to activate campaign tracking. You can de-activate campaign tracking at any time by unchecking this box.
After you complete the form, click Save to add the campaign to your account.
Adding Tracking Links to Campaign
After you click Save, you will be redirected to the page where you can add links to your campaign and convert them into the tracking links. There are two ways to add and convert links: 1) by importing links from the email and 2) by adding links manually.
Importing Links from Email
If you have already created a message with links that you want to track, you can use the “Import from Email” option to convert regular links into tracking links.
If you send a HTML email, paste your HTML source. If you send a plain text message, paste your text and click on the “Import Links” button.
The picture below shows an example of the HTML source with regular links.
After you click on “Import Links”, G-Lock Analytics will add links to your campaign and convert regular links inside your email into tracking links. After the links are converted, copy your email with tracking links and paste it into your email sending program.
Adding Links Manually
Using the “Add Link” button you can add the links manually. G-Lock Analytics will convert them into the tracking links that you will then use in your email message.
Click on the “Add Link” button to add links manually.
Type an URL including http:// and anchor text (optional) and click on “Add Link”.
The link will be converted into the tracking link. The tracking link will be shown at the right side.
How to Track Clicks: Inserting Tracking Link into Email
After you added the links to the campaign and G-Lock Analytics converted them into the tracking links, you can use tracking links in your email.
As we wrote above if you used “Import from Email” option to add tracking links to the email, you can copy the entire message with tracking links from G-Lock Analytics and paste it into your email sending program.
If you added links manually, do this:
1. Copy a tracking link on G-Lock Analytics
2. Open the message in your email sending program
3. Put the mouse at the place where you want to insert the link. Or, highlight the anchor text that you would like to hyperlink.
4. Click on "Insert Link" button and paste the tracking link you copied from G-Lock Analytics. Or, if you already have the links in the email, just replace the regular links with the tracking links generated by G-Lock Analytics.
If the recipient clicks on the tracking link, G-Lock Analytics will count a click.
Important! To track the email addresses of the recipients who clicked on the link, you MUST merge the Email field into the tracking link. To do this, make sure you checked the “Use merge tag” option on the “Add/Edit Campaign” screen and typed the field name in the format that the Merge feature in your email program supports.
The tracking link with the merged field will look like below:
http://www.glocksoft.com?c/kw4/%%Email%%
where %%Email%% is the field name that stores the recipients’ email addresses in your address book.
How to Track Opens: Inserting Open Tracking Code into Email
Opens are tracked by a small transparent image that you insert into the email source. When a recipient opens the email, the image code works and G-Lock Analytics counts an open.
That’s why opens can be tracked for HTML emails only. If the recipient reads the email with images blocked, or on a mobile device in the plain text format, the open is not counted.
G-Lock Analytics automatically generates a tracking image code for you. All you need to do is copy the code from G-Lock Analytics and paste it into your email source.
Just follow these steps:
1. Copy the open tracking code under “Tracking Code and Links” tab.
2. Go to the HTML source of your email and paste the open tracking code somewhere at the end of the HTML code, for example, before the </BODY> tag.
This small transparent image will track the email opens and report them to your account on G-Lock Analytics.
Important! To track the email addresses of the recipients who opened your email, you MUST merge the Email field into the tracking image link. To do this, make sure you checked the “Use merge tag” option on the “Add/Edit Campaign” screen and typed the field name in the format that the Merge feature in your email program supports.
The tracking image link with the merged field will look like below:
<img src="http://www.glocksoft.com?o/37o/%%Email%%" />
where %%Email%% is the field name that stores the recipients’ email addresses in your address book.
Inserting Unsubscribe Link into Email
Using G-Lock Analytics you can collect unsubscribes from each email campaign. G-Lock Analytics automatically generates un unsubscribe code for you.
You just need to copy the unsubscribe code from G-Lock Analytics and paste it into your email source. When a recipient clicks on the Unsubscribe link, G-Lock Analytics will count an unsubscribe. This option is free. Points are not deducted from your account if the recipients click on the unsubscribe link.
To add an unsubscribe link to your email, just follow these steps:
1. Copy the unsubscribe code under “Tracking Code and Links” tab.
2. Go to the HTML source of your email and paste the unsubscribe code at the place where you want the Unsubscribe link to show.
You will be able to see the recipients who unsubscribed under the “Unsubscribed recipients” tab.
Here you can download a complete user guide How to Track Email Marketing Campaigns with G-Lock Analytics (in PDF format).
Tags: analytics, email marketing campaigns, email newsletter, Email Tracking, html email, statistics, transparent image