Using Google Analytics For GIF And Email Tracking

  Categorized under:

I’ve been using Google Analytics for a while but wanted to use a way to track email open or deliver rates. Enter this page regarding email tracking:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingTroubleshooting.html#GIFVars Tracking

Then of course I find
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mobile/mobileWebsites.html Analytics for Mobile
Where Turadg says on Stack Overflow:
“As others have pointed out, you can’t use Javascript in email. The actual tracking is done by a request for __utm.gif though and the Javascript just constructs the GET parameters.

Google supports non-Javascript uses of Google Analytics per their Mobile web docs: http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs/web/

They document the full list of parameters, but the only necessary parameters are:

Parameter Description
utmac       Google Analytics account ID
utmn       Random ID to prevent the browser from caching the returned image
utmp       Relative path of the page to be tracked
utmr       Complete referral URL

So let’s create an example email, send it via MailChimp or WordPress or other item, or hell, all mail servers I can find to make sure I get some analytics back!

— Zeus ::)
Jan 04, 2012

   

Real Time Web Analytics