Lessons

Lesson Info

Analytics and Checkpoint 3

now let's take a look at reporting and analysis. The big world of email data. There's a lot that will cover especially getting better tracking about your email campaigns and what you need to know is that there are these things called query strings. It's a little advanced but essentially you are adding on words and numbers to the actual links that you put into the emails for you to track and they take the form of U. T. M. Codes. Something that google uses very widely. If you've ever used google analytics you've definitely seen these walk through them together to make it a little less complicated and demystify this whole experience. Let's go over U. T. M. Code stands for urchin tracking mechanism. Do you ever need to know what it stands for? Not really. U. T. M codes actually existed before google. So these things are fairly archaic compared to the existence of the internet and they have not died. So this is what a U. T. M code looks like. It is a bunch of text and numbers all squeezed i...

n together in application. So we'll just dissect this. It is appended which means just like added on to the end of any U. R. L. In this example you have a question mark. Everything to the left of the question mark actually is the web page. Everything that happens to the right of the question mark which is your two TM codes. That is additional information for the actual server. So in recap you have a normal your realm and that's great. It calls up the right web page and all that kind of stuff and then you make a question mark and then everything to the right is just made for tracking purposes. It allows you to be self referential. You now send out a link and when somebody clicks it are able to get additional information that really well describes it. So this is a standard email format. You have four individual fields for U T M codes. They're called source medium content and campaign. The trick about U T. M codes is just being consistent with yourself because there's actually no wrong way that you can do this. If we break it out even further. The medium is usually the channel or the category. If I say that the channel in categories email then it totally makes sense that the source which is usually who distributed your campaign were kind of personifying things now it's usually that or your subcategory. So a subcategory of email newsletter. Other subcategories of email include transactional legion promotion, whatever you are actually running and definitely refer back to the beginning of this course where we cover different types of emails. The campaign them the campaign is great for the unique initiative that you're doing. I'm just trying not to say campaign again, but it's the initiative such as back to school or it might be your south by southwest activation whatever it is. It usually aligns not just to email marketing but aligns to your greater marketing overall and content is the fourth field. We use it here to literally describe the content in the email that includes a link. So you would hyperlink text. You might also hyperlink images. And this allows you to better track what they clicked and then how that impacts what they do on your property such as by something or perhaps they bounce and in this way you can go back to your email and optimize it based on what they actually did. So I have this example linked in the document and this example is fictional representation of what an organization can do you damn codes again because you're trying to be consistent with yourself. I highly encourage you to have a spreadsheet that has a common name as well as the actual code that you would put into the U. R. L. So here it's like paid email and paid email. You can see medium source campaign and content. It's all here. One thing you really don't want to do is be ambiguous because eventually, especially at higher scale you're going to send a lot of these out and then you will lose context along the way. So I highlighted this one which is hurricane Alex. I don't know what that means unless it's literally about hurricane Alex if it's code for something. I think that's an improper way to use U. T. M. Codes because they will not know what it is when they, your analysts are actually looking through it. So how do we actually use these U. T. M. Codes are upended on the links that you put out in the world with the intention of people clicking back to your property. So I actually wouldn't put U. T. M. Codes on your own website. Instead these go onto your advertisements to go onto your emails and so forth. These are external facing things if you want, google has a great U. R. L. Builder and allows you to add in all the different information. So you can see I have my website newsletter email and then the campaign is fiber learning and the campaign content might be dog picture and it will then generate the link that I copy and paste. I intentionally put a space here though because you can see when I did that it did percent 20. This can be good or bad depending on the platform you actually use if you're using google analytics for example it will interpret percent 20 as a space in your reporting. However other events databases would not necessarily. And then you just have this huge like mess. So I would figure out how your events database or analytics platform actually reads this information and then adjust accordingly. It's overall good practice just to use underscores or hyphens instead because it's a little bit cleaner for everyone involved. However you really don't need to do this in male chimp. Again in male chimp you have that opportunity for every single campaign to add in a campaign g you have the opportunity in every single campaign to add in the google analytics, tracking automatically. It's all over the advanced settings and the tracking settings for every campaign you're going to send out from one offs to automated. The great thing about data analysis is that it dictates everything else in the email, such as the copy, the actual designs, the images and things like that. So everything we're learning right now refers back to it. And when you are finally staging your campaign, here's how we're related to day to make sure that it's the correct segment and it's aligning to the correct objectives and that your key performance indicators and metrics then aligned to those objectives. One of the biggest mistakes that people make is that they don't keep the data and the objectives in mind when they're really making the campaign and not that I really need to say it, but please spell check and grammar check your emails before you send them because it will affect your metrics. All right, So how do you actually generate a reports when you are generating a report, you're doing it on a campaign to campaign basis. So let's go to campaigns and then we can see this test campaign that I ran and I'm going to one view the report and it should show all of the basic metrics and then after that, what you can do is kinda look a little bit further in and I'm actually gonna go back and look across other campaigns so I can have you. So when you review a report it will have a bunch of information that helps you understand what did not go well and opens clicks, bounces unsubscribed. This is your overall health metrics but it's only part of the picture though because it doesn't report what happens on your platform except for average order revenue and average order value and things like that. Which is why we absolutely need to track everything with things like U. T. M. Codes and then look through google analytics for the rest of the information. This is not specific. Just email marketing. Every kind of marketing needs multiple sources to kind of patch together the overall story. So for example an instagram instagram gives you great metrics about its native data, however it still doesn't give you property data and that's why with instagram you still need to use google analytics or another analytics platform as well. Like all of the IBM Watson marketing products, the entire suite covers all of this together and you can execute within just IBM. But again and I do want to drive this point home is that when you're starting out these freemium products are perfect when you are evolving into larger list sizes and multi channel then you'll have to look elsewhere overall these are very purpose built and purpose driven tools and the purpose of male chimp is to enable small and medium sized businesses and the purpose of something like IBM Watson marketing is to enable kind of like everything from the top tier of male chimp and then beyond to infinity. Now we want to download and when we go to the actual report, so we downloaded it and I want to open it with Excel. When you download the report it gives you all the metrics that we just saw. Um And but instead of just viewing the metrics, it now just shows you across a spreadsheet. You can make pivot tables, whatever you think works the best for your organization, um your client and the campaign. So it's as simple as this. If you want to make a chart, feel free to do that and then you can send that over to your client. But good thing about email marketing overall and like really every other kind of marketing is that the metrics are so simple that you probably don't even need to export. Um but this is how you use that functionality. Let's do another checkpoint. This time we're gonna put data analysis into practice. Just a baby step though, download the data set called example data set and look through all of the emails. What you'll see is a series of emails with the metrics and performance that they actually did and with your expert data brain pull out which specific emails performed well and which specific emails did not perform well for this data check point. What I want you to do is look over this data set, we have multiple rows, we have multiple columns and many of the metrics that are most important email everything from click to open rate to unsubscribed. My prompt to you is which of these is performing well and not well. It's the most common email marketing question because every time that you log in to see your campaigns, that's exactly what you want to see. So this left column a it's the different emails that you sent out. However, for the most part you're you are going to change this based on your objective of the analysis. So instead of Email 1, 2, 3 it might be geography ease. It might be genders, it might be ages. However you want to splice it. I think that this is your standard reporting and your metrics will be the same every time in terms of the types of metrics that you're using. But you'll just pivot differently with a different dimension. So assuming that these are all different email sends look over and decide what metrics are you going to start with? Some of these metrics are more important than others to identify what is performing well and what is not performing well. So choose one of each. Good luck. After you're done. We'll come back and walk through it together