Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Email Reporting - Visual Clickthroughs


Understanding the performance of each of your emails is a key goal in marketing. In many of our emails today, where there are many articles, and numerous offers, analyzing email performance needs to go to the level of the individual link.

That can be daunting to wrap your head around if you are presented with a table of links and the number of clicks, as you'll have to refer back to the email at each step to understand which link was which.

A better technique is to do it visually. With the visual click-through overview, you can see and understand email performance at the level of the individual link quickly and easily.

Start with the standard email dashboard for the email you're interested in. From the top right menu in the dashboard, choose the "Visual Click-through Overview".

The report will show you a view of your original email with the data on number of clicks and percentage of clicks layered on it.

Using this report is a great way to get a better understanding of exactly what offers are driving interest. In combination with A/B testing, you can also understand how offer placement affects clickthrough rates very quickly and easily.

As always, comments are welcome and appreciated.







8 comments:

Staci said...

Hello -

Great article - this was one of the features in Eloqua I was most excited about a couple of releases ago.

Do you know if the Visual Click-Through link report will ever be available to add to a dashboard? Especially when setting up dashboards for management it's invaluable to be able to show visually how an email performed.

Also - I've noticed in instances where the same link appears twice (such as an image and a text link) the report shows both links as having the same number of clicks. What would be the best way to discriminate between the image and text link so you can see which performs better?

Steven Woods said...

Staci,
Great points on both of those. Definitely things that the product team are talking about, although we're not sure of the final resolution yet. I'll make sure they know your vote. Thanks!
Steve

T. Baxter said...

Steve,

This is great for HTML emails, but there is a bug that prevents it from being used to report on emails using templates, which our firm uses for most of our Marketing campaigns. I've mentioned this several times but nothing has been done to fix this as of yet.

Baxter

Steven Woods said...

I'll see what's happening with that Baxter, thanks for the heads up.

Joel Rothman said...

There was a great suggestion in Eloqua Customer Central regarding the question Staci asked regarding multiple identical links in the email. The suggestion was to add a query string to the end of the links when they repeat. So, for example, you could have:
www.example.com/link.html?id=1 and www.example.com/link.html?id=2 . This should show up as 2 separate links in that report.

T. Baxter said...

Joel,
Great idea. I've used QSs to identify content but using it to differentiate the same link is really smart. Thanks for letting me know about that.
Baxter

leslie said...

Can anyone tell me what the difference is between the 'click-through visitors' report shown underneath the 'visual clickthroughs' link on this dasbhoard vs. 'the visitors' report which also sits underneath the 'additional reports' in this email dashboard? I'm getting various numbers.

Ben McPhee said...

Leslie,

These reports differ by virtue of the number of links on which it is reporting. To summarize, the Clickthrough Visitors report requires you to select a single link, and then the report shows you how many visitors arrived at your site through only that link. The Visitors report shows all visitors that arrived at your site through any tracked link in that email.

So unless your email only has one link that has driven people to your website (within the selected timeframe), these two reports will always show different visitor results.

Hopefully this clarifies the discrepancy you are seeing.