Do you include your website link in your email signature? I would hope so. Do you have a mailing list where you email your subscribers on a regular basis? As well, I hope so. Do you really know how effective your email campaigns really are though? When sending out emails there are a couple of easy ways to track their effectiveness. You can link to pages specifically designed for emails, or you could simply make the link include some sort of identifier. Unfortunately, those methods only track the email that you send out. What if someone shares your site through email that you didn’t send? Are you tracking those?

With Google Analytics you can track not only your email campaigns, but what others are emailing while referencing your site. Know how viral your site really is! It’s all done with Google Analytics Advanced Segments, and I will include a link to share this filter with you at the end of the post.

Advanced Segments

By setting up a filter with Google Analytics Advanced Segments, you can filter out all visitors with exception to the ones that came from a mail server like Yahoo, Google, or Live. Instantly know where those email visitors are landing on, their bounce, average page views, and everything you can see normally.

The filter I set up simply displays all visitors from sources that include the text “mail” within it. This is typically a mail sever. Looking at the logs for Best Web Image, I had nearly 100 sources, and they all appeared to be mail servers. I was a little surprised actually on how many different email servers Yahoo has.

The extra nice thing about using this advanced segment filter is the fact that if you did not track your email campaigns in the past, you can now. It will go all the way back to the day you installed the Google Analytics on your site. This could also help you realize if there was any unexpected surges or viral action going on that you didn’t predict. You may be a little surprised on what gets passed around.

Share Your Segments

So here is one thing that is very cool that Google does. It makes it easy to share your advanced segments. Want instructions on how to set up your mail filter? No need, I’ll just give you a link, and then you will have it. If you looked at my screenshot above, you may have also noticed the filters for Firefox users and Internet users. Those are not as fun to analyze as the email filter, but certainly nice to have.

Here are my advanced filters. Hopefully you will comment below, and share yours!

• Firefox Users Advanced Segment – Track Firefox users only
• Internet Explorer Advanced Segment – Track IE users only
• Email Advanced Segment – Track visitors that showed up through email

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