TIP OF THE MONTH | AUGUST 2008
By Leslie Pazan, LinkShare Corporation
Email newsletters are one of the main methods for communication with publishers in your program. One way to gauge the success of your communications is to track the open rate, which will give you an idea of how many publishers are opening each newsletter. Read on for instructions on how easily track open rates using the LinkShare interface. For more information on Understanding Email Open Rates, check out our Best Practices article from the April 2008 issue of The Link.
1) SET UP:
a. Make sure you have a publisher account set up in the LinkShare network.
b. In the Advertiser Interface, create a group called “Tracking” and only assign this publisher account to the group.
2) CREATE A TEXT LINK:
a. Name/Title for the text link should be specific to the newsletter mail date.
b. Text Copy & Landing Page URL are not needed.
c. Make the end date 1 year from today.
d. Assign the text link to the “Tracking” group.
3) GET THE LINK:
a. Log into the Publisher Interface using your publisher account.
b. Locate the text link you created in the list of text links.
c. Copy the tracking portion of the linking code (identified below in bold). Make sure you replace the encrypted site ID with the [SITE.CODE] token before pasting into your newsletter code:
 |
4) APPLY THE LINK:
a. Embed the tracking link at the bottom of the HTML code for your newsletter; this code will not be seen by the recipient (see below). Please note, you can only apply tracking to HTML newsletters – text newsletters can not be tracked using this method.
5) MEASURE THE OPEN RATE:
a. 7 days after the newsletter is sent, generate a Link Type report using Synergy Analytics (We suggest checking impressions 7 days after the newsletter is sent for the most accurate open rate results).
b. Drill down by Text Links, and find the text link # you created for this newsletter.
c. Review the number of impressions your newsletter received.
d. In order to determine the open rate, simply divide the number of impressions by the number of newsletter recipients. You can look up the number of recipients in the “view email status” section of the Advertiser Interface. Just click on “Sent/Cancelled” then “Sent” to get the recipient count for that specific newsletter.
6) CREATE A TRACKING SPREADSHEET:
a. We encourage you maintain a spreadsheet containing the open rates for all newsletters you are tracking (see sample below). This will help you to see trends on how your open rates are affected by subject lines, content etc.
b. For best results, use the findings from your open rate analysis to improve your publisher communications (modify subject lines, optimize content etc).
