Vertical Response Announces Partnership with Google – Better Tracking, Anyone?

Perhaps one of the coolest things in the past few months to hit e-mail marketing – or at the very least a really cool thing, Vertical Response, a third-party e-mail marketing system employed by small to large scale companies throughout the world, announced a partnership with Google to use Google Analytics to better track user response.

According to the press release, “Google Analytics provides detailed reports on clickstream activity by collecting and analyzing data based on the succession of clicks each visitor makes on a website. Now any VerticalResponse user can activate the new feature from their VerticalResponse account profile for free, and begin easily tracking recipient’s subsequent activity. “

If you’ve ever done e-mail marketing and looked at the standard metrics, you’ll notice that it probably takes multiple steps to try and figure out what the hell your customers are doing. First of all, the basic metrics include: Open Rate, Unsubscribed (Spam/Opt-out), Bounced, and Clickthrough Rate (CTR). However, if a savvy advertiser decided to go one step further, they would employ tracking tags that they’d generate from their own system – say, for example, Google Analytics. Once they’ve generated those tracking tags, they’d add them into the e-mail HTML creative and send the e-mail on its merry way to the customer.

Now the hard part is reconciling the data from the e-mail marketing system with the one that generated the tracking tag. However, no longer will you need to…as this partnership is designed to hopefully streamline that process into one big system for you to navigate and figure it out. Plus, perhaps the one benefit that those “pencil pushers” will enjoy is that Google Analytics is FREE and doesn’t require any subscription – anyone can sign up for it! And now it gets to work with a low-cost e-mail marketing system like Vertical Response? Why low cost? Well because it’s pay as you go…you don’t pay a monthly retainer like Constant Contact or any other system, but you do pay based on the size of your database, but only when you send out an e-mail.

Now it may sound like I’m endorsing this thing, which I’m not…but I find it absolutely fascinating that an e-mail vendor is taking tracking to a whole new level! No longer will you be subject ot telling your boss that all you can find is how many people clicked your site, but that you lost their path from there on…you can tell them how many people clicked, their pattern, and where they left or did they purchase anything. Better tracking for all!