How to Track Website Sessions by Email Marketing Campaign

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Data Snacks.

So many of us focus time and energy on building our email lists. The blog posts we write, the videos and podcasts we record, the lead magnets and CTAs we create––a big focus of all of these top-of-funnel activities is the end-goal of growing our respective lists. 

Because we’re putting so much investment in growing a healthy list of subscribers, we need to spend as much time making sure our email campaigns follow through. Today, I’m going to show you an easy way to track, analyze, and report on that.

From a tactical standpoint, here’s what we’re going to cover:

• How to calculate and track website sessions by email marketing campaign*
• 7 critical email metrics you should be tracking the performance of 
• And how to create a comprehensive Email Overview Dashboard that gives you all of this information at a glance

*Hubspot refers to this as Email Marketing Source. Note their definition of the metric: “Traffic categorized under Email marketing comes from HubSpot marketing emails or email links.”

Below, you can view the full episode or keep reading for a fully transcribed version of the episode, complete with relevant screenshots.

Let’s get started.

Alright, I am inside the Databox app, and the first thing I’m going to do is navigate to the Databox Designer. Adding metrics is super easy. Start by choosing the data source from the Metrics Library here on the left, then drag-and-drop some of the available pre-built metrics.

I want to use HubSpot Marketing as my data source. If you use a different email marketing platform, don’t worry, you can still follow along.

The Right Data Visualization is Important

In this case, I want a comprehensive visual overview of how my emails are performing. This will include tracking of sent, delivered, opened, and clicked emails, Sessions by Email Marketing Source, Emails Open Rate, Emails Click Rate in percentages, and Emails Click Rate by Email. I’m going to run through all of these metrics separately in a moment.

With Databox, you can choose how you want to visualize your metrics, and I have selected some options here that best illustrate the meaning behind the data I have selected.

Understanding the Metrics

Emails Overview

We are starting with Emails Overview – from it, I can learn the following four things:

• I have a clear visual representation of how many emails I have sent
• I can see from the number sent how many were actually delivered, in other words, how many actually landed in someone’s inbox
• From how many delivered, I can see how many were opened, and finally
• From how many were open I can see the number that resulted in clicks.

What we want is for the number of emails sent to be as close as possible to the number of emails clicked. Obviously, in a perfect world, they would be the same number. Everyone who you send an email to would open, click the link, and buy what you’re selling. But don’t be worried if you see a big drop from step to step. It’s totally normal.

Now based on this information in this table, I can decide on how I want to get those numbers closer together. I could strategize a whitelisting campaign or clean up my list to ensure a higher delivery rate. I could start testing new subject lines to affect the number of emails that were opened or work on our body copy and the CTAs within the email to get the clicks we want.

Sessions by Email Marketing Source (Campaign)

This metric shows us the number of times our site was visited during the specified date range, split up by email marketing source. The source in this case would be the specific email campaign.

With this information, I can see at a glance which campaigns are most effective at driving traffic to my website.

Now that I am able to see which emails are driving site visits, I can start strategizing on how to deliver an even better and more valuable experience in my subscribers inbox.

For example, notice that the “forgot password email” is our winner here. I think when it comes to marketing, we can often forget that the customer experience encompasses every touch point, even mundane ones like that. Instead of looking at this data point as something to be ignored because it’s “not Marketing’s job”, we could instead see this as an opportunity to be creative and collaborate with our Support and Product teams to deliver a high-value experience to our user. My guess is that users who forget their passwords might be logging in for the first time in awhile. This is our chance to re-engage this customer.

Beyond knowing what drives the most site visits, we can also see which are need of some work, and it looks like one of our newsletters might need some more direct CTAs or more engaging body copy.
              

Email Open Rate

You can calculate this metric using Data Calculations available on our Professional and Performer plans. In this case, I go to calculated metrics and drag and drop them into our dashboard. This will tell us the average percentage of emails opened by our list. This is an incredibly important health metric to track.

If this begins to dip, it could tell us a couple of things, the first being that our subject lines aren’t hooking our subscribers into opening an email from us. It could also mean that our list is becoming unengaged—maybe too many salesy emails in a row, or an automated campaign that’s losing its charm.

Email Click Rate and Emails Click Rate by Title

This metric is also available through Data Calculations. Now, having two representations of this metric in our dashboard provides us with additional insights.

First, I have the percentage visualization, which tells me what the average click rate for all of our emails is. Just like Emails Open Rate, this is a great health metric to keep tabs on the quality of your body copy and CTAs. For the second representation here, I chose Emails Click Rate by Title so that I can see exactly which emails have the highest click rate. That can help us identify the email formats and CTAs that work the best.

Once you have your board set up and connected it’s time to ask yourself – Do you notice any patterns? Does a specific topic do really well? Perhaps sending at a particular time period has an effect?

Take note of any patterns that emerge and use these to improve your future campaigns.

Time to Start Tracking

After building a dashboard like this,  keep in mind that some of these metrics might need to be monitored weekly, especially for automated emails, so you can stay alert for any changes or drops. In other instances, you might want to select a custom date range based on specific campaigns you’re sending this month. 

Either way, having these metric visualizations updating automatically will make everything easier for you. 

Want help creating this report? A member of our Success team can build this, and any supporting dashboards, for free to get you started. Schedule a free dashboard setup here.

If you haven’t already, just create your free Databox account and reach out to our team either via chat or email.

See you next time.