Email Campaigns & Google Analytics .. some scribbles

I needed to use of Google Analytics with email campaigns to help analyze the effectiveness of the campaigns.. So here are some scribbles & notes which might help anyone needing to do something similar..

I am going to use a Techjoomla.com email campaign we were creating to promote one of our Products 'JBolo!' a chatting extension for Joomla..

Normally i would have linked the 'Buy Now' Button, Image of the Product & read more, with the following plain link :

http://techjoomla.com/jbolo-chat-for-joomla.html

Now in order that Google Analytics understands the parameters to use to differentiate this from the other stats, we shall pass some additional variables to the link..

A. The Link given to the product image
http://techjoomla.com/jbolo-chat-for-joomla.html?utm_source=phplist&utm_medium=email&utm_term=product_image&utm_content=20%25%2BDiscount&utm_campaign=JBolo%2BPromotion

Now what are all these 'utm_'s ?

Lets see what google has to say on its blog about email tracking..
This is the explanation they provide.

Name	Description	Examples
Campaign Name	Name of the email marketing campaign.	Email News, Email Promo 14 April 2009, Email Newsletter May 2009
Campaign Source	Use Campaign Source to identify who distributed your email newsletter.	If you are sending your own email campaign then use your own company name. If you advertise in other email newsletters then use the name of the particular company sending that newsletter.
Campaign Medium	Set Campaign Medium as 'email' for all your email marketing campaigns.	email
Campaign Content (optional)	If you have multiple calls to action within your email, use different Campaign Content tags to see which version drives more visitors.	20% Discount Offer, New Product Information, Support Services
Campaign Term (optional)	If you have different types of links (e.g. text, buttons, images, etc.) use a different Campaign Term for each type.	Product Image, Read More Button, Text Link

So in our case of the Product image, it was something like this :

Name	variable	Examples
Campaign Name	utm_campaign	Jbolo Promotion
Campaign Source	utm_source	phplist
Campaign Medium	utm_medium	email
Campaign Content (optional)	utm_content	20% Discount
Campaign Term (optional)	utm_term	product image

So this is how the final url is constructed.

http://techjoomla.com/jbolo-chat-for-joomla.html?utm_source=phplist&utm_medium=email&utm_term=product_image&utm_content=20%25%2BDiscount&utm_campaign=JBolo%2BPromotion


You can find a generator for such urls here : http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

Sources : http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/03/tips-for-tracking-email-marketing.html

I hope to post some more info on the Google Analytics API soon..