User Guide
Tracking
Tracking E-mail Campaigns
with G-Lock Analytics
Copyright ©2011 G-Lock Software. All Rights Reserved.
Table of Contents
Introduction…………………………………………….........
3
Creating User Account on G-Lock Analytics……………….
4
Downloading Redirect Script.……………………………….
5
Adding Email Campaign to G-Lock Analytics……………..
6
How to Track Clicks: Inserting Tracking Link into Email…
7
How to Track Opens: Inserting Tracking Image into Email. 12
How to Track Email Prints and Forwards………………….. 15
Inserting Unsubscribe Link into Email.……………………. 16
6
Merging Custom Field into Tracking Link…………………. 17
8
Viewing Email Tracking Reports on G-Lock Analytics…… 18
Afterword…………………………………………………… 24
…..
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Introduction
With G-Lock Analytics service you can clearly understand what is
happening to your emails after they are sent.
With our reports you can figure out if your customers find your emails
interesting, or what part of them they like more. For instance, if you
are selling products online, and you send out a regular newsletter with
a list of new products, you could use G-Lock Analytics to see what your
customers are most interested in.
With G-Lock Analytics you can track:
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Email opens (for HTML emails)
Link clicks (for HTML and text emails)
Email prints and forwards
How many recipients read your email in the plain text format
Unsubscribes
Most engaged recipients
Which email clients your recipients use to open your message
Geographical localization of unique opens and clicks
All the stats are delivered to you in real time! And you can export email
tracking reports to a file at any time.
Warning! G-Lock Analytics interface is NOT compatible with the
Internet Explorer 6. Please, don't use IE 6 to open G-Lock Analytics.
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Creating User Account on GG-Lock Analytics
To start, you need to setup a user account on G-Lock Analytics. This is
where your email campaign tracking metrics will be stored. You will be
able to login and see the reports at any time. To create a user account:
1. Go to G-Lock Analytics
2. Select the plan
3. Click “Signup
Signup”
Signup”
Our plans are limited by the number of subscribers. A "subscriber"
means a unique person (email address) in your list. For example, if you
have a list of 8000 recipients, the Basic plan is enough. And you can
send as many emails to those people per month as you want. The
number of email messages (campaigns) per month does not matter. The
most important thing is to watch that the number of unique email
addresses in your list does not exceed 10000. When you see that you
have more than 10000 subscribers, you need to upgrade to a higher
plan.
After you signup for a plan, the system will automatically create your
user account on glockanalytics.com. Your login email address and
password will be sent you via email. You will be able to change your
password from your account.
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Downloading Redirect Script
After you login, you will be asked to download a redirect script and
upload it to your website. Uploading a redirect script to your website is
highly recommended because this will allow you keep your brand in
front of your recipients and not confuse them with a generic click
tracking link.
You don’t want to send subscribers to a third-party website. Links that
go to a tracking domain may cause some recipients to not trust you and
to not click through.
If you upload a redirect script to YOUR website, tracking links will go
through your own domain and will look like
http://www.yourdomain.com/r.php
If your website is hosted on a Unix/Linux platform,
download a PHP redirect script.
If your website is hosted on a Windows platform,
download an ASP redirect script, or download an ASPX redirect script.
Upload the redirect script to your website. If you don’t know how to
upload the redirect script, send us at [email protected] your login
and password for your website (FTP server) and we will upload the
script for you.
5
Adding Email Campaign to G-Lock Analytics
After you uploaded the redirect script to your site, you can add an email
campaign to your account.
To add a campaign, click on Add Campaign button and fill in the form:
Campaign Name
Any name for your campaign (you can enter the subject of
your email, for example)
Number of Recipients Enter the number of recipients you will send the message
to
Number of Bounced
If you process bounced emails, you can enter the number
of bounces into this field after the email is sent
Use merge tag
Check this box and type the Email field name in the
format supported by the Merge option in your email
sending program. Example: [Email], or %%Email%%, etc.
Merging the Email field is required if you want to see the
email addresses of the recipients who opened your
message and who clicked on the link.
Use redirect script:
Check this box and type the URL of the redirect script on
your website, for example:
http://www.yourdomain.com/r.php
After you complete the form, click Save to add the campaign to your
account.
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How to Track Clicks:
Inserting
Inserting Tracking Link into Email
Click on the campaign name and then click on the “Tracking Code and
Links” at the left side.
There are two ways to add tracking links to the message: 1) by
importing links from the email and 2) by adding links manually.
1) Importing
Importing Links from Email
If your message contains a lot of links that you want to track, use the
“Import from Email” option to convert regular links into tracking links.
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If you send a HTML email, paste your HTML source. If you send a plain
text message, paste your text and click on the “Import Links” button.
G-Lock Analytics will replace regular links inside your email into
tracking links. After the links are converted, copy your email with
tracking links and paste it into your email sending program.
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2) Adding Links Manually
If your message contains a few links, or if you want to track only
specific links in your message, use the “Add Link” button to convert the
links manually.
Type an URL including http:// and anchor text (optional) and click on
“Add
“Add Link”.
Link”
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The tracking link will be displayed at the right side.
Copy the tracking link.
Open the message in your email sending program
Put the mouse at the place where you want to insert the link. Or,
highlight the anchor text that you would like to hyperlink.
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Click on Insert Link button and paste the tracking link you copied from
G-Lock Analytics.
If the recipient clicks on the tracking link, G-Lock Analytics will count
a click.
Tip: If you want to attach a tracking link to an image and track the
image clicks, add a tracking link for the image to G-Lock Analytics,
insert the image into the message, then select the image, click on
“Insert Link”
Link” and paste your tracking link for the image. When a
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recipient clicks on the image, G-Lock Analytics will count an image
click.
Important!
Important! To track the email addresses of the recipients who clicked
on the link, you MUST merge the Email field into the tracking link.
To do this, make sure you checked the “Use merge tag” option on the
“Add/Edit Campaign”
Campaign” screen and typed the field name in the format
that the Merge feature in your email program supports.
The tracking link with the merged field will look like below:
http://www.glocksoft.com?c/kw4/%%Email%%
where %%Email%% is the field name that stores the recipients’ email
addresses in your address book.
How to Track Opens:
Inserting Tracking Image into Email
Opens are tracked by a small transparent image that you insert into the
email source. When a recipient opens the email, the image code works
and G-Lock Analytics counts an open.
That’s why opens can be tracked for HTML emails only. If the recipient
reads the email with images blocked, or on a mobile device in the plain
text format, the open is not counted.
G-Lock Analytics automatically generates a tracking image code for
you. All you need to do is copy the code from G-Lock Analytics and
paste it into your email source.
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Just follow these steps:
1. Copy the open tracking code under “Tracking
“Tracking Code and Links” tab.
2. Go to the HTML source of your email and paste the open tracking
code somewhere at the end of the HTML code, for example, before the
</BODY> tag.
Important! To track the email addresses of the recipients who opened
your email, you MUST merge the Email field into the tracking image
link. To do this, make sure you checked the “Use merge tag” option on
the “Add/Edit Campaign” screen and typed the field name in the format
that the Merge feature in your email program supports.
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Tip:
Tip: Many email clients block the images by default. If your email
message contains some pictures, for example, pictures of the products,
goods you're selling or the like, it is a good incentive for the recipient to
click on the link and download the images. The open will be counted in
this case. But what if your email doesn't contain any images besides the
tracking one? Why will the recipient download any pictures if the
email doesn't contain them? Therefore, I would recommend that you
insert your photo near your signature at the end of the message (like I
did in my emails). As the alternative text for the photo you can write
something like "My Photo". It won't arouse any suspicion with the
recipient and there is a chance the recipient will download the photo to
see you. The tracking image will be loaded together with your photo
and the open will be counted.
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How to Track Email Prints and Forwards
You don’t need to insert any additional code into your message source
to track email prints and forwards. The code you use to track opens
already includes the code for tracking prints and forwards.
Not all email clients and web based services allow track email prints
and forwards. See the table below to know where it works and where it
doesn’t work.
Email Client/Web
Client/Web Mail
Yahoo!Mail
AOL Web
Gmail
Hotmail/MSN/Live
GMX.com (web mail)
Windows Mail
Outlook 2010
Outlook 2003
Mozilla Thunderbird
Print Tracking
Forward Tracking
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Note: Each time the recipient prints or forwards the email, G-Lock
Analytics records an additional open.
open Because of this the number of
opens for the recipient may be higher than the real number of times the
recipient opened the email.
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Inserting Unsubscribe Link into Email
Using G-Lock Analytics you can collect unsubscribes from each email
campaign. G-Lock Analytics automatically generates an unsubscribe
code for you. You just need to copy the unsubscribe code from G-Lock
Analytics and paste it into your email source. Just follow these steps:
1. Copy the unsubscribe code under “Tracking Code and Links” tab.
2. Go to the HTML source of your email and paste the unsubscribe code
at the place where you want the Unsubscribe link to show.
When the recipients open your email, they will see the Unsubscribe
link. If they want to unsubscribe, they will click on “Unsubscribe”.
“Unsubscribe”
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Merging Custom Field into Tracking Link
In some cases email senders need to embed a custom field other than
Email, for example UserID, into the link. That field will not be passed
to G-Lock Analytics, it will be passed to the browser only and used to
identify the recipient on the server to access certain content.
To merge a custom field into the tracking link and pass that field to the
browser once a recipient clicks on the link in the email, follow these
steps.
Copy the tracking link and paste it into your email message instead of
the original link. Example:
http://www.glocksoft.com?c/kw4/%%Email%%
This link must already contain the merged Email field in order G-Lock
Analytics can record unique clicks. (Note:
Note: to merge the Email field into
the tracking links, be sure to check the “Use Merge Tag” option when
you add the campaign and type the field name in the appropriate
format supported by the Merge feature in your email sending program).
To merge another custom field into the tracking link, add the ?
character after the Email field and type your custom field in the right
format, for example:
http://www.glocksoft.com?c/kw4/%%Email%%?userid=%%ID%%
Note that you need to paste the tracking link and merge your custom
field into the link in both HTML source and plain text part of the
message.
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Viewing Email Tracking Reports on GG-Lock Analytics
After your email message is sent, you can go to your G-Lock Analytics
account and watch email tracking statistics collecting in real time. Click
on the campaign name and see the reports:
Overview
The “Overview” report gives you the general stats on your campaign.
Here you can see:
- total of recipients
- number of unique/total opens
- how many recipients opened your email in the plain text format (%)
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- number of unique/total clicks
- number of prints and forwards
- number of bounced emails
- number of unsubscribes
Timeline
The “Timeline” report will show you the campaign statistics for a
certain period of time. You can define the time period yourself: month,
day, or hour.
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Recipient
Recipient Activity
In the “Recipient Activity” report you can see the email addresses of the
recipients who opened your email, clicked on the links within the
email as well as who printed and forwarded your message. You can
export the email addresses either to a CSV file or Excel XML file.
Note: Each time the recipient prints or forwards the email, G-Lock
Analytics records an additional open.
open That’s why the number of opens
for the recipient may be higher than the real number of times the
recipient opened the email.
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Most Engaged Recipients
Here you can see a list of most engaged recipients of your email
campaign. Most engaged recipients are determined based on the
number of opens/clicks that you define in your account settings. Click
on the “Account” and look at the bottom of the page.
By default most engaged recipients are selected by 3 opens/clicks. This
means in the “Most Engaged Recipients” report you will have a list of
recipients who opened your email or clicked on the links 3 times or
more.
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Link Click Activity
The “Link Click Activity” report will show you which links in your
email were clicked, who clicked them and how many times.
You can export the report either to a CSV file or Excel XML file.
Geographic Localization
Under “Geographic Localization” you can see the recipient’s activity on
your email all over the world for a selected period of time. Put the
mouse on a country to see how many visits your email got from that
country.
Under the map there is a list of countries and the number of email
opens from each country.
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Unsubscribed Recipients
Here your unsubscribed recipients will be collected if you use the
unsubscribe link generated by G-Lock Analytics. You can export
unsubscribes to a CSV file, zipped CSV file or Excel XML file.
Email Clients Usage
G-Lock Analytics registers what email client the recipient uses to open
your email and saves collected data to the report called "Email clients
usage".
usage"
This report provides a great overview of which email clients are popular
and splits them up by version. This is crucial for email clients like
Outlook, where your real concern is Outlook 2007 users as opposed to
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those using older versions. We list the most popular clients at the top of
the report so you can quickly see the versions that need your attention.
Why is this useful? For testing purposes. The hardest part about
designing email newsletters is making them look great in different
email clients. This report is a huge time saver. Once you know what
email applications your subscribers use to read your emails, you can
setup test accounts in these clients/services and send a test copy of your
message to those accounts prior to emailing to the whole list. You will
clearly see what part of the email needs your primary attention. You
will also understand whether your email is delivered to the Inbox, or to
the Junk/Bulk email folder and fix potential problems before your email
campaign is launched.
Afterword
We'd really love for you to tell us what you like and dislike in G-Lock
Analytics email tracking service. If you dislike anything and would like
it to be improved, or have any suggestions for new features, please, take
just a few seconds, and send us an email at [email protected]
sharing your thoughts.
Your suggestions can make a big difference, and will help us develop
and improve the service for you. It's thanks to our fantastic user-base
that we keep adding more and more features - and that's what makes us
the best email marketing tool.
Sincerely,
G-Lock Software Team
www.glocksoft.com
www.glockanalytics.com
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