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• How to measure the performance of a newsletter (or any email) with Matomo

  19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft

  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 :

  

  1. How many users opened your email
  2. How many users interacted with the links in your email
  3. 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 requires to add 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.
  In order to install it, here is an example of what this code looks like :

  <img src="https://piwik.example.com/piwik.php?idsite=YOUR_PIWIK_WEBSITE_ID&rec=1&bots=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Femail-opened%2Fnewsletter_XYZ&action_name=Email%20opened&_rcn=internal%20email%20name&_rck=newsletter_XYZ" style="border:0;” alt="" />

  The Matomo tracking pixel explained

  The above URL is composed of the following URL parameters which are part of our Tracking API :

  • idsite : Corresponds to the ID of the website you would like to track.
  • rec : You need to have rec=1 in order for the request to be actually recorded.
  • bots : Set it to 1 to include all the connections made to this request, bots included.
  • url : corresponds to the URL you would like to display in Matomo (Piwik) every time the email is opened.
  • action_name : This is the page name you would like to be tracked when the email is opened.
  • _rcn : The name you would like to give to your campaign.
  • _rck : The keyword you may like to use in order to summarize the content of your newsletter.

  You may have noticed some special characters here such as “%20”, “%2F”. That’s because the URL is encoded. We strongly recommend you to do so in order for your tracking not to break. Many tools are available on the web in order to encode your URLs such as https://www.urlencoder.org/.

  If you would like to access the previous tracking code easily, keep in mind that you can always find the tracking code generator within the “Matomo admin panel → Tracking code” :

  

  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) ?

  As a result, the information will be pushed as following for any user who opens your email :

  

  To not bias your regular page views on your website with newsletter openings, we recommend tracking newsletter openings into a new website.

  Tracking even more data : the user ID example

  You can go deeper in your URL tracking by inserting other parameters such as the user id if you have this information within your emailing database. One of the main benefit of tracking the User ID is to connect data across multiple devices and browsers for a given user.

  You only need to add the following parameter &uid=XXX where XXX equals the dynamic value of the user ID :

  

  Make sure that UID from your emailing provider is the same as the one used on your website in order for your data to be consistent.

  Important note : some email providers are loading email messages by default which results in an opening even if the user did not actually open the email.

  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 (Piwik) 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 (Piwik) 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 (Piwik) 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 (Piwik) 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 (Piwik).

  Did you like this article ?

  If you enjoyed reading this article, do not hesitate to share it around you. Moreover, if there are any topics you would like to write us about in particular, just drop us an email and we will be more than happy to write about it.

  The post How to measure the performance of a newsletter (or any email) with Matomo appeared first on Analytics Platform - Matomo.

• How to measure the performance of a newsletter (or any email) with Piwik

  19 décembre 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  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 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 Piwik properly.

  Different tracking levels for different needs

  There are many things that you may be interested to track, for example :

  

  1. How many users opened your email
  2. How many users interacted with the links in your email
  3. 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 Piwik

  Tracking email openings requires to add 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.
  In order to install it, here is an example of what this code looks like :

  <img src="https://piwik.example.com/piwik.php?idsite=YOUR_PIWIK_WEBSITE_ID&rec=1&bots=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Femail-opened%2Fnewsletter_XYZ&action_name=Email%20opened&_rcn=internal%20email%20name&_rck=newsletter_XYZ" style="border:0;” alt="" />

  The Piwik tracking pixel explained

  The above URL is composed of the following URL parameters which are part of our Tracking API :

  • idsite : Corresponds to the ID of the website you would like to track.
  • rec : You need to have rec=1 in order for the request to be actually recorded.
  • bots : Set it to 1 to include all the connections made to this request, bots included.
  • url : corresponds to the URL you would like to display in Piwik every time the email is opened.
  • action_name : This is the page name you would like to be tracked when the email is opened.
  • _rcn : The name you would like to give to your campaign.
  • _rck : The keyword you may like to use in order to summarize the content of your newsletter.

  You may have noticed some special characters here such as “%20”, “%2F”. That’s because the URL is encoded. We strongly recommend you to do so in order for your tracking not to break. Many tools are available on the web in order to encode your URLs such as https://www.urlencoder.org/.

  If you would like to access the previous tracking code easily, keep in mind that you can always find the tracking code generator within the “Piwik admin panel → Tracking code” :

  

  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) ?

  As a result, the information will be pushed as following for any user who opens your email :

  

  To not bias your regular page views on your website with newsletter openings, we recommend tracking newsletter openings into a new website.

  Tracking even more data : the user ID example

  You can go deeper in your URL tracking by inserting other parameters such as the user id if you have this information within your emailing database. One of the main benefit of tracking the User ID is to connect data across multiple devices and browsers for a given user.

  You only need to add the following parameter &uid=XXX where XXX equals the dynamic value of the user ID :

  

  Make sure that UID from your emailing provider is the same as the one used on your website in order for your data to be consistent.

  Important note : some email providers are loading email messages by default which results in an opening even if the user did not actually open the email.

  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 Piwik 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 Piwik” 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, Piwik 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 Piwik 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 Piwik 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 Piwik.

  Did you like this article ?

  If you enjoyed reading this article, do not hesitate to share it around you. Moreover, if there are any topics you would like to write us about in particular, just drop us an email and we will be more than happy to write about it.

• How Media Analytics for Piwik gives you the insights you need to measure how effective your video and audio marketing is – Part 2

  
  2 février 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  In Part 1 we have covered some of the Media Analytics features and explained why you cannot afford to not measure the media usage on your website. Chances are, you are wasting or losing money and time by not making the most out of your marketing strategy this very second. In this part, we continue showing you some more insights you can expect to get from Media Analytics and how nicely it is integrated into Piwik.

  Video, Audio and Media Player reports

  Media Analytics adds several new reports around videos, audios and media players. They are all quite similar and give you similar insights so we will mainly focus on the Video Titles report.

  Metrics

  The above mentioned reports give you all the same insights and features so we will mainly focus on the “Video Titles” report. When you open such a report for the first time, you will see a report like this with the following metrics :

  

  • “Impressions”, the number of times a visitor has viewed a page where this media was included.
  • “Plays”, the number of times a visitor watched or listened to this media.
  • “Play rate”, the percentage of visitors that watched or listened to a media after they have visited a page where this media was included.
  • “Finishes”, the percentage of visitors who played a media and finished it.
  • “Avg. time spent”, the average amount of time a visitor spent watching or listening to this media.
  • “Avg. media length” the average length of a video or audio media file. This number may vary for example if the media is a stream.
  • “Avg completion” the percentage of how much visitors have watched of a video.

  If you are not sure what a certain metric means, simply hover the metric title in the UI and you will get a detailed explanation. By changing the visualization to the “All Columns Table” in the bottom of the report, you get to see even more metrics like “Plays by unique visitors”, “Impressions by unique visitors”, “Finish rate”, “Avg. time to play aka hesitation time”, “Fullscreen rate” and we are always adding more metrics.

  These metrics are available for the following reports :

  • “Video / Audio Titles” shows you all metrics aggregated by video or audio title
  • “Video / Audio Resource URLs” shows you all metrics aggregated by the video or audio resource URL, for example “https://piwik.org/media.mp4”.
  • “Video / Audio Resource URLs grouped” removes some information from the URLs like subdomain, file extensions and other information to get aggregated metrics when you provide the same media in different formats.
  • “Videos per hour in website’s timezone” lets you find out how your media content is consumed depending on the hour of the day. You might realize that your media is consumed very differently in the morning vs at night.
  • “Video Resolutions” lets you discover how your video is consumed depending on the resolution.
  • “Media players” report is useful if you use different media players on your websites or apps and want to see how engagement with your media compares by media player.

  Row evolution

  At InnoCraft, we understand that static numbers are not so useful. When you see for example that yesterday 20 visitors played a certain media, would you know whether this is good or bad ? This is why we always give you the possibility to see the data in relation to the recorded data in the past. To see how a specific media performs over time, simply hover a media title or media resource URL and click on the “Row Evolution” icon.

  

  Now you can see whether actually more or less visitors played your chosen video for the selected period. Simply click on any metric name and the chosen metrics will be plotted in the big evolution graph.

  This feature is similar to the Media Overall evolution graph introduced in Part 1, but shows you a detailed evolution for an individual media title or resource.

  Media details

  Now that you know some of the most important media metrics, you might want to look a bit deeper into the user behaviour. For example we mentioned before the “Avg time spent on media” metric. Such an average number doesn’t let you know whether most visitors spent about the same time watching the video, or whether there were many more visitors that watched it only for a few seconds and a few that watched it for very long.

  One of the ways to get this insight is by again hovering any media title or resource URL and clicking on the “Media details” icon. It will open a new popup showing you a new set of reports like these :

  

  The “Time spent watching” and “How far visitors reached in the media” bar charts show you on the X-Axis how much time each visitor spent on watching a video and how far in the video they reached. On the Y-Axis you see the number of visitors. This lets you discover whether your users for example jump often to the middle or end of the video and which parts of your video was seen most often.

  

  The “How often the media was watched in a certain hour” and “Which resolutions the media was watched” is similar to the reports introduced in Part 1 of the blog post. However, this time instead of showing aggregated video or audio content data, they display data for a specific media title or media resource URL.

  Segmented audience log

  In Part 1 we have already introduced the Audience Log and explained that it is useful to better understand the user behaviour. Just a quick recap : The Audience Log shows you chronologically every action a specific visitor has performed on your website : Which pages they viewed, how they interacted with your media, when they clicked somewhere, and much more.

  By hovering a media title or a media resource and then selecting “Segmented audience log” you get to see the same log, but this time it will show only visitors that have interacted with the selected media. This will be useful for you for example when you notice an unusual value for a metric and then want to better understand why a metric is like that.

  

  Applying segments

  Media Analytics lets you apply any Piwik segment to the media reports allowing you to dice your visitors or personas multiplying the value that you get out of Media Analytics. For example you may want to apply a segment and analyze the media usage for visitors that have visited your website or mobile app for the first time vs. recurring visitors. Sometimes it may be interesting how visitors that converted a specific goal or purchased something consume your media, the possibilities are endless. We really recommend to take advantage of segments to understand your different target groups even better.

  The plugin also adds a lot of new segments to your Piwik letting you segment any Piwik report by visitors that have viewed or interacted with your media. For example you could go to the “Visitors => Devices” report and apply a media segment to see which devices were used the most to view your media. You can also combine segments to see for example how often your goals were converted when a visitor viewed media for longer than 10 seconds after waiting for at least 20 seconds before playing your media and when they played at least 3 videos during their visit.

  Widgets, Scheduled Reports, and more.

  This is not where the fun ends. Media Analytics defines more than 15 new widgets that you can add to your dashboard or export it into a third party website. You can set up Scheduled Reports to receive the Media reports automatically via email or sms or download the report to share it with your colleagues. It works also very well with Custom Alerts and you can view the Media reports in the Piwik Mobile app for Android and iOS. Via the HTTP Reporting API you can fetch any report in various formats. The plugin is really nicely integrated into Piwik we would need some more blog posts to fully cover all the ways Media Analytics advances your Piwik experience and how you can use and dig into all the data to increase your conversions and sales.

  How to get Media Analytics and related features

  You can get Media Analytics on the Piwik Marketplace. If you want to learn more about this feature, you might be also interested in the Media Analytics User Guide and the Media Analytics FAQ.