We all know that every marketer wants to understand the conversion rate generated by their marketing automation campaigns in order to measure the famous ROI (return on investment).
So it is necessary to use a traffic analysis tool like Google Analytics, which provides a lot of information about the online customer journey.
The data there is anonymized, but combining Google Analytics with a marketing automation solution such as Webmecanik Automation lets you know the conversion rate of your campaign emails. The link between these 2 solutions is made through UTM parameters.
What are UTM used for
First, let’s define UTM (Urchin Tracking Module), the name given by the company Urchin—acquired by Google—which was the basis for the development of UTM.
UTM are specific parameters for Google Analytics, placed after the URL (generally after the question mark) to identify where the visitor came from on a given webpage—for example, from an email marketing message or a sponsored ad.
Example: https://example.com?utm_source=newsletter-mai&utm_medium=e-mail&utm_campaign=printemps-ete
There are 5 UTM parameters (source, medium, campaign, term and content), but it’s not mandatory to use all of them. Typically, you use the source parameters (to identify a particular email, a social network, or a search engine), medium (to identify the channel such as emails or display banners), and campaign (to identify a specific campaign).
Once the UTM are added, it becomes easy to see where prospects came from on a specific landing page and thus tell whether your marketing automation campaigns are performing well. And more specifically, see which emails attracted the most visitors to your landing page, or from which emails the conversion rates are highest.
How to analyze UTM in Google Analytics
To identify traffic sources in Google Analytics, go to the Acquisition > All traffic > Source/Medium section
Here, you’ll have access to all the sources that bring you visitors. You’ll therefore have visibility into each of your marketing automation campaigns and their performance. This way, you can directly see the return on investment (ROI).
How to set up UTM in Webmecanik Automation?
For users of the marketing automation solution Webmecanik Automation, we explain how to add UTM to all the links in your emails.
Once inside your Webmecanik Automation account, go to the Channels > emails section
Then go to edit your email. In the right-hand part of the email editor, you’ll find a section dedicated to UTM.
Fill in the different UTM that you consider important (for reminder, it’s not required to have them all). Once your UTM are present, they will automatically be added to all the links in your email, meaning you don’t have to add them manually to each link. It saves you time.
How to display the conversion rate of your marketing emails in Google Analytics
We’ve seen that UTM are used to identify traffic sources. But to know which traffic sources convert, it’s necessary to create conversion goals in Google Analytics.
This can be, for example, destination pages, time on a page, etc., which can be considered a conversion. In the case of a destination page, it can be a thank-you page after submitting a form. So someone who wants, for example, to download a white paper or register for a webinar would be redirected to a thank-you page after submitting the form. Visitors can only access this page if they submitted the form, so they must have converted.
To configure conversion goals in Google Analytics, refer to this article.
For companies that don’t do e-commerce :
To calculate the ROI of your marketing automation campaigns, your conversion goals must have a defined value. This value is monetary and lets you add an amount for each conversion.
This amount is an estimate. So it’s up to you to set this value based on what your different conversions represent.
More information about goal values in this article.
For e-commerce companies :
The goal is to calculate the revenue generated for each conversion goal. Therefore, you should not add a value for the goal, since it is automatically calculated via the e-commerce tracking code.
More information in this article.
Once all your goals are created and you set UTM parameters for each of your marketing automation campaigns (see different UTM for each marketing email within a marketing automation scenario), you’ll be able to analyze both which marketing campaigns bring in the most traffic and which campaigns convert best or generate the most revenue.
