To be able to grow your business, it is crucial to track all your marketing efforts. This includes all newsletters and emails that you share with people outside of your business. Otherwise, you won’t be able to know which of your daily efforts are yielding results.
Are you wondering if it is possible to track the performance of an emailing campaign in Matomo (Piwik) efficiently? Would you like to know if it is technically easy? No worries, here is a “How to” tutorial showing you how easily you can track an emailing in Matomo properly.
Different tracking levels for different needs
There are many things that you may be interested to track, for example:
- How many users opened your email
- How many users interacted with the links in your email
- How many users interacted on your website through your email
Let’s have a look at each of these levels.
Step 1 – Tracking email and newsletter openings in Matomo
Tracking email openings can be implemented by adding an HTML code to your newsletter. It works through what we call a tracking pixel, a tiny image of 1×1 that is transparent so the user will not be able to see it. You can find more information about it on our guide at: How do I track how many users open and read my newsletter emails (using a pixel / beacon)?
Step 2 – Measure the clicks within your emailing
Tracking clicks within an email lets you know with which content readers interacted the most. We recommend tracking all links in all your emails as a campaign, whether it is a newsletter, a custom support email, an email invoice, etc. You might be surprised to see which of your emails lead to conversions and if they don’t, try to tweak those emails, so they might in the future.
Tracking clicks This works thanks to URL campaign tracking. In order to perform this action, you will need to add Matomo URL parameters to all your existing link URLs:
- Website URL: for example « www.your-website.com ».
- Campaign name: for example « pk_campaign=emailing ». Represents the name you would like to give to your campaign.
- Campaign keyword: for example « pk_keyword=name-of-your-article ». Represents the name you would like to give to your content.
- Campaign source: for example « pk_source=newsletter ». Represents the name of the referrer.
- Campaign medium: for example « pk_medium=email ». Represents the type of referrer you are using.
- Campaign content: for example « pk_content=title ». Represents the type of content.
You can find more information about campaign url tracking in our “Tracking marketing campaigns with Matomo” guide.
Here is a sample showing you how you can differentiate some links in a newsletter, all pointing to the same URL:
Once you have added these URL parameters to each of your link, Matomo will clearly indicate the referrer of this specific campaign when a user clicks on a link in the newsletter and visits your website.
Important note: if you do not track your campaigns, it will result in a bad interpretation of your data within Matomo as you will get webmail services or direct entries as referrer instead of your newsletter campaign.
Step 3 – Measure emailing performances on your website
Thanks to Matomo URL campaign parameters, you can now clearly identify the traffic brought through your emailing. You can now specifically isolate users who come from emails by creating a segment:
Once done, you can either have a look at each user specifically through the visitor log report or analyze it as a whole within the rest of the reports.
You can even measure your return on investment directly if goals have been defined. In order to know more about how to track goals within Matomo.
Note: for more information, see also our FAQ How do I track how many users open and read my newsletter emails (using a pixel / beacon)?
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