Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking how people get to your site, and what they do there.

If you have a Google Analytics account, you can add  Google Analytics tracking to your Guestfolio campaigns. Integrating Google Analytics with your Guestfolio account allows you to track clicks from your campaigns all the way through to your website. If you want to track purchases, make sure Google Analytics is set up to track conversions. 

In addition to Guestfolio Campaign tracking of revenue, clicks and links, recipient activity, Guestfolio also offers integration with Google Analytics that when enabled will automatically create a campaign in your Google Analytics account. The page that you link to from the Guestfolio newsletter must have Google Analytics tracking enabled.

Google Analytics offers tracking on: Clicks, Visits, Visitors, Page views and Unique Page views to pages targeted from a Guestfolio newsletter. 

Google Analytics Clicks not directly related to Guestfolio's campaign revenue and click tracking.

How to use

When you create a Guestfolio newsletter, the Setup step provides an option to enable Google Analytics link tracking

• Click Google Analytics link Tracking from the setup page
• Campaign title is automatically generated from the Campaign name and date of Campaign creation, however this can be edited
  This is the title that will appear within your Google Analytics Campaign tracking page
• The Campaign(campaign title), the Source(subscriber list used), medium("email") attributes are attached to each link in your Campaign email, when clicked they pass these attributes to your Google Analytics tracking, automatically creating or updating a Google Analytics Campaign.
• Please send a preview email of the campaign to yourself to ensure that the Google Analytics tracking is supported by your website. 
  Occasionally additional parameters added to links are ignored or may create links not to work. We highly recommend previewing the campaign and clicking the links to ensure they are valid when using Google Analytics prior to sending the campaign.
  
  Expected results
  
  Tracking may take up to 48 hours to show in Google Analytics

Clicks vs Visits

Google Analytics (GA) Visits should generally correlate to Guestfolios' Unique Clicks. However:

• If you link to a non-GA tracked site, there will be more Clicks than Visits.
• If a user clicks a link in an email multiple times within the 30 minute Analytics "session" window, there will be a Click for every time they clicked, but only one Unique Click and one Visit.
• If you have links to multiple GA-tracked sites in a single email, you'll have a Visit logged in each, but only one Unique Click. Unique Clicks are tracked per message, not per link in the message.
• If a recipient forwards a message, or revisits your site after 30 minutes, you'll have more Visits than Unique Clicks, though there will be a Click for each. Currently, we cannot differentiate when a message has been forwarded, so there's only one Unique Click.

A few scenarios:

• You link to your Facebook profile in your email. A recipient clicks the link, which will result in 1 Guestfolio Click, but no GA Visits.
• A recipient clicks a link in your message, forwards it to their friend who also clicks a link, or they re-open it in a new browser/device. This will log 1 Unique Click, 2 Clicks, 2 Visitors, and 2 Visits.
• A recipient clicks a link in your message, comes back an hour later, and clicks the same or a different link in the message to get back to your site. This will log 1 Unique Click, 2 Clicks, 1 Visitor, and 2 Visits.

Troubleshooting

• Google Analytics doesn't work retroactively. The Google Analytics account has to be set up and configured before the campaign is sent.
• Does your website code allow the following external variables?
  utm_campaign= 
  utm_source= 
  utm_medium= 
  For the sake of page security, a link is designed to fail if a query value outside of what is expected is fed in to a page. This can break your links and disable the tracking if these are not accepted by your website.
  If you're not sure that your website is configured to handle these strings, forward this information to your webmaster to verify and troubleshoot further. Otherwise, you'll want to disable the Google Analytics tracking feature in Campaigns