It’s easy to schedule email reports in the new version of Google Analytics. You can set up email reports to be sent to your own inbox, to colleagues within your organization or anyone else who needs to be kept updated on a regular basis on your website’s performance. You can choose to send your Dashboard Report, any of the Standard Reports (Visitors Overview, Traffic Sources Overview, Goals Overview, etc.) or, if you have Custom Reports set up, you can send a Custom Report. (Don’t have Custom Reports set up? Read this post on using Custom Reports. And here’s a Custom Report Configuration so you don’t have to create your own.)
How To Get Google Analytics Reports Sent to Your Inbox
1. Log in to your Google Analytics account. Go to the report you want to email and click on Email under the title of your report. (We’ve highlighted it in green below.)
2. In the Email Report box, enter the email address you want the report sent to (multiple email addresses need to be separated by a comma) and, if you want, edit the subject line.
3. Next to Attachments, you can specify the file format you’d like the report to be sent in.
4. Set the Frequency (Once, Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Quarterly) and Day of Week you’d like the report sent.
5. If you click on Advanced Options you can set how long you want the email setting to be active for.
6. Write an email message in the text field. This message will go out with all of the reports.
7. Click Send
Looking for more help with Google Analytics? Check out our blog category on Google Analytics tips.
Posted by Crissy Campbell | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Email Marketing should be an essential part of your marketing toolkit because everyone uses and understands email. Email newsletters are easy and inexpensive to send out, they’re easy to track and measure (email newsletter software has analytics that reports on how people are engaging with your newsletter) and they’re an opt-in way to send information to people who’ve chosen to receive your content. If you’re unsure of the relevance of email, see this post and infographic on the value of email.
Use a service dedicated to email newsletter distribution. These service providers have strict email rules that keep their servers white listed, which means that your newsletter is more likely to get through spam filters. They also give you the ability to measure your campaigns and manage your email list subscribes and unsubscribes.
Although it requires a bit more technical know-how, we like Campaign Monitor because:
The signup process can happen on your website’s URL. This allows you to track newsletter signups (and where they drop off in the signup process) in Google Analytics.
You can give Client Access to an account so that clients can access to their own newsletter list and reports without having access to all of the accounts you manage.
2. Know When to Send Out Your Newsletter
In general, best practice for sending out email newsletters is midweek (Mondays are too busy, Fridays people are trying to finish things up for the weekend). You want to either send out your newsletter between 7-8am so that it’s in subscribers’ inboxes when they arrive at work and are sitting down to go through email, or send it out at lunch time so that people will read them when they look at their email after lunch.
Despite these general best practices, it is always better to tailor them specifically to your own audience. Find out what day and time your audience is online by going into your analytics and seeing what day and time of day gets the most traffic on your site.
In the new version of Google Analytics:
Log in to Google Analytics. Go to Overview
Here you can see visits by day and hour by clicking on the icons above the graph on the right hand side
In the old version of Google Analytics (this version gives you a report that’s easier to read):
Log in to Google Analytics. Scroll to the bottom and click Old version - Reporting (the new version of Google Analytics doesn’t have this report)
Go to Visitors > Visitor Trending > Visits
Here you can see visits by day and hour by clicking on the icons above the graph on the right hand side
3. Use Google’s URL Builder to Track Your Campaigns
If your email service provider doesn’t integrate with Google Analytics, use Google’s URL builder to create a custom URL for the links in your newsletter so that you can track them in analytics. For example, if you include http://www.yourwebsite.com/contact in your newsletter, while you can see in analytics how many visits there were to that URL, you won’t know how many of those visits were directly from your newsletter.
Instead, use the URL builder to create a custom URL that identifies people coming from your newsletter. Note: the URL builder can be used to track any online campaign, including ad campaigns and blogger outreach campaigns.
Make sure to think through your parameters so that it will make sense in your analytics reports. Here’s an example of the parameters for a newsletter going out this month via Constant Contact:
Campaign Source: ConstantContact
Campaign Medium: Email
Campaign Name: May 2012 Newsletter
To find this report in analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns.
4. Use Email Newsletters in Tandem with Other Marketing Tools
As mentioned above, email newsletters should be used in tandem with your blog and social media efforts.
For your blog, this means organizing your editorial calendar for the blog together with your email newsletter. If you have a quarterly newsletter, for example, publish blog posts throughout the quarter, and then send out your newsletter while slowing down activity on the blog.
Also think about reusing content from your blog in your newsletter. For example, send out a newsletter that is a roundup of the top 5 most popular blog posts on your site that quarter.
Like any online marketing tactic, you should measure the success of your email marketing in relation to your overall business objectives. Possible metrics include:
Building a social media audience is not an easy task. It takes dedicated time to find fans and followers and even more time to experiment with sharing the right types of content that will earn Likes, RTs and +1s.
With social media, one size does not fit all. Every platform has different strengths and weaknesses and audience building tactics that work well on Facebook, for example, may not work on Twitter, and vice versa.
Below are tips for building an audience on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
Best Practices for Building an Audience on Facebook
Best For: engaging on a more personal level, communities, causes.
Content to Share: videos, photos, blog posts, events, campaigns, ask questions, ask for likes and opinions.
Tip #2: Growing your Facebook fan base increases interactions. Facebook ads are one way to promote your Page to potential fans as well as to friends of your fans.
Tip #3:Facebook insights can help you understand who your audience is and what they are engaging with on your page.
Best Practices for Building an Audience on Twitter
Best For: updates, news, customer service, answering questions, finding people and subjects of interest to follow, conferences.
Content to Share: news, articles and links to content relevant to your audience, hashtags.
Granting other users access to your Google Analytics is easy to do and offers administrators the ability to share traffic data with key contacts such as colleagues within the organization, outside consultants, and anyone else who needs to make strategic decisions based on website data. Google Analytics also offers tiered access levels to help govern who has read-only access to view reports vs. who has full admin access for setting goals and adding filters.
How to Give Someone Access to Your Google Analytics
Note: You can only add users if you are an Administrator of the account.
1. Log in to Analytics and click on the Admin tab in the top right corner, then select the User tab. Click the +New User tab. (We’ve highlighted it in green below.)
2. In the New User form, add the person’s email address. Note: the email needs to be a Google address. If you’re adding more than one user, you can separate multiple addresses by commas or spaces.
Next, choose the person’s role.
Users have read-only access. They can’t modify Analytics settings and you can restrict them to specific profiles.
Administrators have full access and the same privileges as account owners. They have access to all reports, and they can modify settings, add users, create profiles, set filters and setup goals.
3. At the bottom of the form is where you grant profile access to Users.
The Admin role will have access to all profiles, but if you grant User access (read-only), then you need to select the profile(s) on the left and click Add. The User will be able to view any profiles that appear in the list on the right.
Integrating Google Analytics with your email newsletters is important so that you can track what visitors from the newsletters do on your site.
While most email marketing services track the clicks on links in newsletters, they don’t track important metrics about what visitors do after they click. When running an email newsletter campaign, you can track this data by integrating Google Analytics with your email tool in order to answer questions like, how long do visitors from the email spend on the site? How many pages do they visit? Do they convert, or how many goal completions do they make such as downloading a whitepaper, purchasing a product or requesting a quote? What’s the conversion rate for newsletter visitors vs. non-newsletter visitors?
Knowing this information allows you to measure the success of your email newsletter efforts.
To further understand what newsletter traffic does on your site, once Google Analytics integration is set up, you should also create an advanced segment in Google Analytics to isolate your email traffic so you can look at visitors from your email campaigns in relation to other audience segments.
How to Add Google Analytics Tracking Code to Constant Contact Emails
1. Log in to Constant Contact.
2. In the Emails tab click on the email you want to schedule.
3. In Email Settings, once all of the fields are correctly filled out and you have a Send To List selected, click Schedule in the top right corner.
4. In the Schedule pop-up window select Include Google Analytics and enter in a Google Analytics Campaign Title. This is what you’ll see in Analytics to identify your email so choose a naming convention that will make sense when you’re looking at your Analytics reports. If you send out a monthly newsletter, use the name of the month/year as your campaign title. If your newsletter is topic-based, then perhaps include the subject keyword. i.e., Apr-12 News: Facebook Tips
5. Click OK.
View Your Campaign Reports in Google Analytics
1. Log into Google Analytics and in the sidebar select Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns
2. Here you’ll see your Campaigns listed by Campaign Title. By default, the Campaign Source is the same as your Campaign Title and the Medium is auto completed as email.
Posted by Crissy Campbell | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Here’s an unintentional Easter egg from YouTube. Awkward thumbnail images.
Easter eggs in video games are hidden messages or rewards for players. They are usually little in-jokes, secret rooms or minor segues that help motivate players to continue exploring a game. Overtime Easter eggs have been built into DVDs, websites, apps and most other digital formats. The Easter Egg Archive lists 14,289 Easter eggs that people have found in software, movies, DVDs, books, music and even art, posters and advertisements in the physical world.
Easter eggs are fun and they tell us something about people. People are silly. People like silly things.
How is this related to marketing? Well, people are your market. So how do we appeal to this low-level sense of silliness in marketing?
You could take a not-so-subtle approach like the “Smell Is Power” series of Old Spice commercials, where Old Spice’s Isaiah Mustafa busts up the Charmin or Tide Bounce commercial. There is definitely something silly about this. The ads play off the predictable nature of how bathroom products are sold. We have a scene in soft lighting with whites, light blues and beiges. A nice looking woman in a button-up collared shirt tells us in soothing tones about the extra softness or fresh-air scent of the product. These ads are so predictable that they lull us into a sense of calm, which is broken 5-10 seconds into the commercial by the masculine power of Old Spice, which is so big and powerful that it can’t stay in its own commercial.
Or you could take a more subtle approach by offering rewards and coupons for dedicated followers of your brand. Michaels, for example, offers weekly coupons for crafters in the know. The “surprise” is the unpredictability of the percentage discount or the select items on sale. Fashion retailers follow the same model by presenting exclusive offers to shoppers who subscribe to their email newsletters or who order online. It’s the digital version of the Kmart “Blue Light Special” which was first introduced in 1965 by a store manager looking for ways to stimulate merchandise sales by randomly announcing sales on items in particular aisles.
Alternatively, there is the totally blatant approach, which is the Kinder Surprise. Is the thing being sold the toy inside or the egg? I’d argue it’s the experience of guessing what’s inside the egg, which is exactly how packages of hockey cards are sold. Will you get the rookie card? Or the Trader Joe’s mystery beer packs—$5.99 for 8 random beers.
What’s your Easter egg?
Google uses their logo to present daily illustrations that encourage visitors to explore search results for random points of interest or factoids about that particular day. It’s a surprise. It’s fun. It plays to our sense of curiosity.
Twitter itself is a game. In a sense, it has a score. We keep returning because something might be happening.
Blenz Coffee in Vancouver gave me a “Friends of Blenz” card for a free beverage. I randomly (or perhaps not so randomly) was compelled by their point-of-sale promotion and ordered my London Fog with almond milk instead of regular milk. Et voila, a nice little bonus for doing so.
Odette Morin of You-First Financial enters client names into an annual draw for dinner out when they refer people to You-First for financial planning and investment consulting.
Apple sends stickers with each purchase.
Each of these things are nice little surprises, and as Seth Godin says, investing in delight can go a long way. The next time someone starts talking to you about the gamification of your website, app or marketing efforts, start small by thinking about Easter eggs. What little elements of delight can you add to someone’s day? How can you embrace both the predictable and unpredictable aspects of your website, email newsletter or social media marketing? It doesn’t have to be hard to be good. The best games set the rules early by establishing “what is this” and “what can I do here”, by reassuring the player that they are on the right track with clear navigation cues and by creating reactive elements and rewards. Sounds like website design. Sounds like great marketing campaigns. Sounds like engaging social media.
Have a great marketing Easter egg to share? Post it in the comments.
Posted by Monique Sherrett | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
I’ve found that my best presentation skills actually come from my experience acting and as a ballerina. Yes, that was in high school and university, but that practice in front of an audience has been invaluable to me. Plus I see these core presentation skills in my friends and colleagues, in particular Tod Maffin whether he’s podcasting or presenting—you can hear his years of radio experience—and Darren Barefoot when he’s presenting on anything has a certain stage presence that comes from his theatre background.
People who’ve had acting experience know how to perform for an audience. This is something that Darren and I have discussed at length. There’s a certain understanding of storytelling and performance that goes into a good presentation. So my 1 minute marketing tip for professional speakers—or sales and marketing people like me—is to take an acting class. There are always community centres, dedicated schools and continuing ed courses in acting, which is that step beyond Toastmasters or other classes in public speaking. Acting classes reinforce the performance aspect as well as the improvisation skills that make so many great presenters appear natural and comfortable on stage.
So if you’re interested in upping your game as a professional speaker, or even if you’re frequently doing client presentations, guest speaking or other sales and marketing presentations, I highly recommend taking a theatre or acting class.
If you’re in the Vancouver area, one of our clients, ContinuingEd.ca, is offering an 8-session course staring April 17 called Acting for the Fun of It.
Regardless of where you live, find a class that works for you, and have fun!
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