Emails are thoughtfully designed to capture the attention of your audience. Included in your email marketing, Call-To-Actions (CTAs) and other links provide subscribers the ability to engage with your eCommerce website. But how often are those links generating revenue?
Obtaining prospective subscribers is one thing; understanding their behavior is another. Some may make a sale right then and there. Others may bounce around and return to your website day after day until closing the deal or walking away. Then there’s still another group that may never open the email in the first place.
How can you track this activity and use it to your advantage to optimize your content? Get ready to immerse yourself in the concept of click tracking.
What is Click Tracking?
Click tracking focuses on user engagement, where clicks are taking place, and how often your subscribers click. Why? Because clicks contribute to generating revenue. It is a technique marketers and analysts use to measure email marketing campaign success.
How Click Tracking Works
The tracked link is overwritten so that, when clicked, it moves through a secondary portal before redirecting the user to the desired landing page. That movement allows the system to record the click.
Types of Click Tracking
There are a few applications that you can use to implement click tracking:
Email Campaigns
Click tracking with email campaigns give you visibility to how many people are opening the communication. In addition, it reports the click rate. How? Your email service provider (ESP) generates a unique URL to track. It’s as simple as that.
Links
There are several ways to track links. One of the most popular is UTM tracking or Urchin Tracking Module. A query string is set up to include the traffic source or campaign name. How is this helpful?
It gives you the birds-eye view of what platform your traffic is coming from, such as a social media platform, email, etc.
User experience (UX)
Have you ever seen a heatmap where it shows you data in variations of color? User experience click tracking is fairly similar. With data collected from UX, you’ll get a vivid view of your subscriber’s click patterns.
Review the heatmap for hot spots and cold spots. The hot spots equate to heavy traffic. The cold spots you may want to hone in on to understand why people are not as interested there, or what you could do to make it more appealing.
Pair your heatmaps with session recordings or user replays for the best results. Session recordings do not track clicks; however, they are another way to assess user activity and can help you answer questions such as why cold spots are showing on your heatmap.
Examples of Linked Content To Track
Links are found in numerous places. They are embedded in emails, on websites, etc. Here are just a few examples of what you may consider to track on in your campaign:
- External links
- How often are these being clicked on, copied, or even hovered over?
- Forms. Are our online forms being opened, completed, and submitted? Or is the process getting abandoned?
- Video Content. Follow how users are watching the content. Does the video playthrough, or are they pausing or stopping the content collectively at a particular point?
- Mouse Movement. Where are people moving the pointer, and how are they interacting with your site's content?
- Buttons, pull-down menus, scroll bars, and more. How often are they being utilized and pressed?
What Is Your Click-Through Rate?
This is an important metric used to measure how effective advertisements are, whether they are banners, ads, keywords, free listings, etc. Think of it as a health metric for your business.
To calculate your CTR, you’ll need to track the number of clicks the particular advertisement receives. Divide the number of clicks by the frequency of the ad being shown, or impressions.
According to Local IQ, across all industries, the CTR for Google Ads alone is 3.17%. So we will ask again, what is your CTR, and how does it compare to the industry average?
Incorporate your click-through rate with your click tracking analytics. This gives you the end result, whereas click track will fill in the details, allowing you to tell the full story.
How is Click Tracking Useful?
Click tracking provides a good baseline, showing you how your marketing campaign is performing and giving you the opportunity to enhance the design, layout, etc., based on the results.
So what really makes click tracking useful? It:
- Allows companies to track advertisements that are working and ones that may require attention or updating.
- Identify bugs or spot errors (i.e., broken links).
- Strengthens conversions
- Discover information to better segment subscribers by geographical location, demographics, etc.
- Learn when the best time of day is to send out emails.
You can make an average of $36 for every $1 spent in email marketing, so make it count and use click tracking to your advantage.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) To Include and Analyze
This is not inclusive of all of the statistics you’ll be analyzing, but naming a few:
- Click Rate - How many people click on a link included in your campaign?
- Total Clicks - Total number of times a link was clicked, including multiple clicks from an individual user.
- Click Performance - Ranking of the links clicked, allowing you to see your top performers versus your under-utilized ones.
- Clicks per unique open - Calculated as a % of users that opened an email campaign and clicked on a corresponding link.
- Last clicked - Timestamped showing the last date and time someone clicked on the tracked link.
- Total Clicks - Total number of subscribers that clicked on the tracked link. Reporting also allows you to drill down and view which subscribers clicked on it.
What To Watch Out For When Tracking Clicks
Notice a sudden increase or decrease in your click rate when comparing data? A drastic change could be due to a few variables, including spam filters, formatting, etc.
Decreased Click Rate
When click rates drop, take a look at the formatting of your URLs. For example, do they begin with “http://” or “https://?” If not, they won’t be tracked.
Check for syntax errors or typos in the URL. This can quickly break the link and interfere with click tracking.
Increased Click Rate
Of course, you want your click rate to increase, as this could lead to a higher conversion rate. There are cases where it will increase and have no revenue-generating result, such as with a spam filter or forwarding technique.
When analyzing the data collected from click tracking, look out for spam filter clicks. These are fake clicks that can quickly sway your performance stats if they are not identified or accounted for. There is no simple way to tell, though, if a spam filter is creating the variance except that the results may drive from a single domain.
What To Do Next
Embrace the power of click tracking and enable it with your marketing campaign! Accumulate data and use it to build a better experience for your customers.
Use it to drive prospective customers to your eCommerce site and increase sales, optimize your website, and more.
Start using click tracking today to grow your brand and drive continued awareness of your website.
Ready to engage with your customers and boost traffic to your website? We’d love to help you design an email marketing strategy that will meet your business and your customer’s needs.
Visit QuaGrowth to learn more about email marketing automation.
Sources:
How Click Tracking Can Improve Email Marketing | QuickMail
How to Measure Individual Link and CTA Clicks On Each of Your Blog Posts
Search Advertising Benchmarks for Every Industry [2021 Data]
