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Integrating Email Campaign Data with
WebTrends
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Table of Contents
Audience ................................................................................................................ 5
Introduction ............................................................................................................ 5
Integration Requirements.......................................................................................... 5
WebTrends Requirements ......................................................................................... 5
Email Marketing Provider Requirements ...................................................................... 6
What WebTrends Features Support the Integration?...................................................... 6
Preparing for Your Email Campaign............................................................................. 6
Configuring WebTrends for Email Integration ............................................................... 7
Creating Data Sources to Track Your Campaign ............................................................ 7
Creating an Email Campaign Profile ............................................................................ 8
Tagging the Email Creative........................................................................................ 9
URL Encoding Special Characters ........................................................................ 11
Collecting Clickthrough Data .....................................................................................11
Working With SmartReports .....................................................................................12
Installing SmartReports .......................................................................................... 13
Downloading Email Campaign Data........................................................................... 13
Adding Email Campaign Data to SmartReports ........................................................... 13
Getting More Information .........................................................................................15
Audience
This guide is written for WebTrends Professional Services Engineers. Do not distribute to
customers.
Introduction
This document is designed to guide you through the steps needed to integrate external data
about responses to your email marketing efforts with WebTrends site traffic reports in order
to refine future campaigns. Using this guide, you will learn how to:
• Set up an email creative to collect email results for WebTrends
• Configure WebTrends to report on an email campaign
• Use WebTrends SmartReports to combine email results with Web site results.
If you are new to reporting on email campaigns with WebTrends, read the guide, How Do I
Measure Campaign Success, before attempting this integration.
To download this guide:
1. Select Resource Center in the left pane of the WebTrends Admin Console.
2. In the Resource Center tab, click the White Papers and Guides link.
3. Under How Do I Guides, select How Do I Measure Campaign Success.
Integration Requirements
Integrating your email data with WebTrends requires that you work closely with both your
email campaign administrator and your WebTrends administrator. In addition, make sure
that your WebTrends system and your email marketing provider meets the requirements in
this section.
WebTrends Requirements
The following requirements must be met before integrating email campaign data with
WebTrends:
WebTrends Product
Version Required
WebTrends On Demand
Professional or Enterprise Edition
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WebTrends software
WebTrends Professional or Enterprise v7.5a
SmartSource Data Collector (SDC) v7.5a or higher running in servicemodel which supports the account rollup data source. For more
information about upgrading or configuring SDC to run as servicemodel service, see “Basic Installation” in the WebTrends Installation
and Configuration Guide.
SmartReports
SmartReports “template” v7.5a or higher
Note: In addition, you will create one profile dedicated to analyzing email marketing
activity.
Email Marketing Provider Requirements
You or your email marketing provider must be able to:
• Send HTML email campaigns. WebTrends cannot track plain text emails.
• Add an image request to the email footer for tracking results.
• Add WebTrends query parameters to the links of the email.
• Provide you with a CSV file containing aggregate email campaign activity. One of
the fields must contain values of the campaign query parameter.
What WebTrends Features Support the Integration?
WebTrends provides the following features to support this integration:
• Email Conversion Funnel shows what happened after the clickthrough
• Email Campaigns template makes it easy to apply preconfigured reports to your
profile
• WebTrends SmartReports allow you to combine email results with Web site
results demonstrating the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Preparing for Your Email Campaign
1. Decide on a unique Campaign ID for each campaign you want to track. Campaign IDs
are strings that can include text, numbers, or both text and numbers. Because you will
be exporting your campaign reports as SmartReports, consider using text or a
combination of numbers and text to avoid problems with number auto-formatting in
Microsoft Excel.
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2. Decide what campaign attributes you want to use in drilldowns, such as Demand
Channels, Creative Types, Creatives, and other attributes that will be expressed as
dimensions in the drilldown report. You will provide information about these attributes in
the campaigns.csv translation file. For more information about customizing translation
files, see the guide How Do I Measure Campaign Success?
3. Decide what information you want in your Email Campaign report in addition to
clickthroughs, visits, and page views. If you want to include order or revenue
information in your report, you will need to tag your Web site either using META tags or
by programmatically passing the parameters of interest as part of the URL.
Configuring WebTrends for Email Integration
Setting up WebTrends for email campaign integration involves the following steps, which are
described in detail in this section:
• Create a new data source to track email campaign activity
• Create a profile to track email campaign activity
Creating Data Sources to Track Your Campaign
When implementing email campaign reporting for the first time, you need to create a
separate WebTrends data source with a new DSCID specifically for tracking the email opens
for your campaign. Continue to use your existing data source for Web site tracking.
There are several reasons for using a separate DSCID to track email campaign activity:
• Email recipients who open the email but do not click through are not counted as
new visitors until they actually go to the Web site.
• Email open events from the campaign do not affect overall site metrics.
• WebTrends can track your email campaign separately from site activity.
• WebTrends can report on email campaign traffic combined with site traffic using
the account rollup data source.
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The following graphic shows how your two DCSIDs are used:
The following table provides an overview of the data sources you need to create for email
campaign reporting. Later sections of this guide provide details on using the DCSIDs.
Data Sources to Create
DCSID Deployment Locations
DCSID for Web site tracking
Tag your Web pages with the Web site tracking DCSID to
track site activity. If you currently use WebTrends, this is
the DCSID you have in place.
DCSID for email open tracking
Use email campaign DCSID in the image request in the
email creative and in the email links.
Creating an Email Campaign Profile
As part of the integration, you create a profile that shows email campaign activity and Web
site activity related to the email campaign.
To create a profile for email campaign traffic:
1. In the left pane of the Admin Console, select Web Analysis > Reports & Profiles.
2. Type a name for the profile such as “Email Campaign” in the Profile Name text box.
3. Type the URL of home page in the Web Site Domain Name text box.
4. Select the Advanced profile options check box, and click Next.
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5. Select Web Server as the type of content to be analyzed.
6. Select Standard (Full-featured Analysis) as the type of profile to create, and click
Next.
7. Continue following the profile wizard. For more information about the dialog box
settings, see Help.
8. In the Data Sources dialog box, select both the data source you created to track
email campaign activity and the data source that tracks site activity.
9. In the Summary dialog box, click the Advanced Settings check box.
10. Under Analysis > Visitor History, select the Enable Visitor History check box.
Also select the Campaign History, Visit History, and Purchase History check
boxes.
11. Under Advanced > Session Tracking, select Track Sessions for SmartSource
Data Collector Logs (Account Rollup).
12. If you use URL Rebuilding, under Advanced > URL Rebuilding, make sure that any
parameter that is passed to identify the email campaign is not excluded from the
analysis. For example, if your email marketing provider uses a parameter named
jobid in the email to identify the email campaign, and you use WebTrends On
Demand, you specify the jobid parameter in the exception list. If you use
WebTrends software, you have the option of including all parameters except those
that you specify in the exception list. In this case, be sure that your jobid parameter
is not in the exception list.
13. Under Advanced > Scenario Analysis, select the Email Conversion Funnel.
14. Under Advanced > Custom Reports, select the check boxes for Email Campaigns
and Email Conversion Funnel by Campaigns.
15. Under Reports, select the Email Campaigns template.
Tagging the Email Creative
In order to collect data about an email campaign, you or your email marketing administrator
must add a WebTrends JavaScript tag to the email. The JavaScript tag collects data about
email opens and clickthroughs to the landing page.
The email creative must also include an image request for a 1x1 pixel to record the email
open event. Place this image request in the footer of the email creative.
The following example includes all the correct parameters.
<IMG BORDER="0" NAME="DCSIMG" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1" SRC="http://
dcsid/njs.gif?dcssip=www.email.com&dcsuri=/emailpreview.asp?&WT.mc_pa=EmailProv
ider&WT.mc_id=EM1234567&WT.ti=Email%20Name&WT.mc_ev=emailopen&
WT.dcsvid=SubscriberID&WT.js=No">
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You can use the previous example as a template for each campaign. Replace the values in
italics with the value described in the following table.
WT Parameter
Parameter Setting
Value Description
DCSID
DCSID value from your
data source you
created email tracking.
This is not your Web
site DCSID.
Use the same DSCID value for all email
campaigns.
This parameter should also include the URL of
your SmartSource Data Collector.
If you use WebTrends On Demand, always specify
for the URL followed by
a forward slash then the Email Campaign DCSID.
For example,
http://statse.webtrendslive.com/dcs1111111
STATSE.WEBTRENDSLIVE.COM
If you use the software version of WebTrends,
use the URL of your own SmartSource Data
Collector server followed by a forward slash then
the Email Campaign DCSID.
Note: All views of your email will generate a
page view in this data source.
WT.mc_pa
Email Provider Name
Identifies the email marketing provider. If you
send the email from your own system, this field is
still required.
This provider name will appear in the Campaign
drilldown report under Partners, or in the Partner
report under the Marketing Folder in the standard
Complete View template.
WT.mc_id
WebTrends Campaign
ID
Specifies the WebTrends Campaign ID for this
email campaigns. Assign a unique value for each
email campaign.
dcssip
Email campaign
provider domain
Specifies the email campaign provider domain. If
you don’t know the domain name of the email
server, you can specify email.mydomain.com,
where mydomain is your organization’s domain
name.
dcsuri
Email URL
Specifies the URI (URL) where you view the email
creative on your email provider’s site. If a URL is
not available, specify the name of the email
campaign.
Because HTML emails are not Web pages, use
this setting to uniquely identify each email
creative.
WT.ti
Email campaign name
Specifies an easy-to-recognize name for the
email campaign.
Note: You will still need to use a Campaign
translation file to display the email campaign
name for other reports in WebTrends. For more
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information, see “Using Custom Reports” in the
WebTrends Advanced Configuration Guide.
WT.mc_ev
EMAILOPEN
Specifies the campaign event type. Always set
value of this parameter to EMAILOPEN.
WT.dcsvid
Email Subscriber Id
(Optional. Enterprise Edition only) Specifies the
unique ID of a customer provided by the email
marketing provider. For example, if the email
vendor substitution variable for the target email
recipient’s customer id is %%CUSTNUMBER%%,
the value for this parameter is
%%CUSTNUMBER%%.
Use this parameter to track which visitors
responded to which emails for more targeted
email campaigns. Visitor History must be enabled
in the profile for this parameter to be reported
on. You must also create a new custom measure
based on this parameter and a new custom report
to use it. For more information, see “Using
Custom Reports” in the WebTrends Advanced
Configuration Guide.
URL Encoding Special Characters
If the parameter values you want to use contain characters other than letters or numbers,
you need to URL-encode those special characters to prevent problems with analysis. For
example, because the space character is used to separate fields within a log file, spaces in a
parameter value are problematic. Consider how the WebTrends query parameter
assignment of WT.ti="My Email Campaign"; is written to the log file:
&WT.ti=My Email Campaign
The solution is to URL-encode all query parameter values by replacing certain characters
with their hexadecimal equivalents.
For example, the URL-encoded form of WT.ti="My Email Campaign"; is:
&WT.ti=My%20Email%20Campaign
Note that space characters have been replaced by %20. Alternatively, you can also use a +
sign in place of the space.
The format for URL-encoding is %XX where XX is the character's numeric ASCII value.
Collecting Clickthrough Data
If you want to collect clickthrough data for specific links in the email, use the parameters in
the following table in the links of interest. How you will pass these parameters depends on
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your site configuration. If the links in the creative take the user directly to the target page,
you can simply pass the WT.mc_id parameter as part of the URL. For example,
http://www.mydomain.com/product.htm?WT.mc_id=CampaignId
However, if the creative links contain a server-side redirect, you need to make sure that the
WT.mc_id parameter is included in the URL for the target page as shown here.
http://www.mydomain.com/defaultlandingpage.aspx?&URL=http://www.mydomain.com/in
dex.aspx?WT.mc_id=CampaignId
WT Parameter
Parameter Setting
Description
WT.mc_id (use on
each link)
Value of the current
campaign
Specifies the WebTrends Campaign ID.
WT.dcsvid
Email Subscriber ID
(Optional. Enterprise Edition only) Specifies
the unique ID of a customer provided by the
email marketing provider. For example, if the
email vendor substitution variable for the
target email recipient’s customer id is
%%CUSTNUMBER%%, the value for this
parameter is %%CUSTNUMBER%%.
Use this parameter to track which visitors
responded to which emails for more targeted
email campaigns. Visitor History must be
enabled in the profile for this parameter to be
reported on. You must also create a new
custom measure based on this parameter and
a new custom report to use it. For more
information, see “Using Custom Reports” in
the WebTrends Advanced Configuration Guide.
Working With SmartReports
WebTrends SmartReports allow you to combine the campaign data from your email
marketing provider with your site traffic data.
Setting up SmartReports to include email campaign data involves these steps:
• Install SmartReports
• Download the email campaign data
• Add email campaign data to SmartReports
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Note: Keep in mind that the campaign data CSV file may contain all available aggregate
data, and because of this, reflects a different time period than the WebTrends Email
Campaign report. The CSV file data may also be more current than the corresponding site
traffic data available in your WebTrends reports.
Installing SmartReports
Before you can export your email campaign data as a SmartReport and add the external
data, you must install WebTrends SmartReports.
To install SmartReports:
1. From the left pane of the Admin Console, select Install Components. Click Install
SmartReports.
2. Run the installation program from the saved location.
Downloading Email Campaign Data
Your email marketing provider will need to provide a CSV file that contains daily aggregate
data for all email campaigns. In some cases, this data may be cumulative and include
aggregate data for the entire campaign. One of the fields in the CSV file must contain the
campaign ID value. You will configure SmartReports to map the campaign ID in the CSV file
to the campaign id in the Email Campaign Report.
Ask your email marketing provider if a script is available to automatically transfer the CSV
file to your local network.
When you receive the file, give it the same file name as the previous file so that you don’t
have to reconfigure SmartReports. You may want to create a backup of the previous CSV
file. Store the file in a static, local drive or network location.
Adding Email Campaign Data to SmartReports
Including your email campaign data in a SmartReport involves three general steps which
are described in detail in the procedure that follows:
• Define an External Data Connection. In this step you specify the location of the
CSV file that contains your campaign data.
• Define a "Join" for the External Data Connection. In this step, you define how to
map your WebTrends Email Campaigns SmartReports data to your CSV file data.
• Apply an External Data Join to your report. In this step, you import the external
data using the join you created.
To create a SmartReport:
1. Open the WebTrends Reporting Console, and navigate to the Email Campaigns
report. If you do not see this report, make sure it is enabled it in the profile. The
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following graphic shows a sample Email Campaigns report.
2. As a best practice, select the date range for the email campaign. If your campaign
starts in the middle of the week, you can select the custom calendar view to specify
the start and end date for the campaign.
3. Click the Export to Database (
) icon and export the report.
4. If you want to only export WebTrends report data for complete days, clear the
Export Partial Days check box. Keep in mind that the external email campaign data
may be more up to date than the available WebTrends data.
5. Click Generate Report. Microsoft Excel opens and displays your report.
6. From the WebTrends menu, select Configure External Data.
7. Select Create Connection, and click Save.
8. Type a name for this connection in the External Data Connection Name text box.
For example, “Email Marketing Data.”
9. Specify the path to the email campaign CSV file in the External Data Location text
box.
10. Click Next. In this dialog box, specify how the rows of data in the CSV file correlate
to the columns of data in your SmartReport.
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11. Click Import to preview the column details of the external data file.
12. Click Next. Specify which column of data is the primary key. Select the Field Name
that contains the campaign ID.
13. Select Always clear old data prior to loading new data.
14. Click Next. Review the Summary information, and click Save.
15. A dialog box opens allowing you to import your data to the MDB. Click Yes.
16. Select the External Data Joins tab.
17. Click Create.
18. Type a name that identifies the Join in the External Data.
19. Select your Email Marketing Data definition from the External Data Definition list.
Click Next.
20. Select CampaignID from the WebTrends SmartReports Field list.
21. Select the equals sign (=) as the operator.
22. Select the field that contains the campaign ID in the External Data Field to Match list.
23. Click Add, and click Next.
24. You do not need to define options for duplicates because you specified equals as the
operator in the previous dialog box. Click Next.
25. Review the summary information, and click Save. Click Close.
26. From the WebTrends menu, select Add External Data.
27. Select the Email Marketing Data connection you created.
28. Click OK and the external data should be added to your report as part of a Pivot
Table.
Getting More Information
The WebTrends Report User’s Guide provides detailed information about setting up
SmartReports. For more information, see the “Using SmartReports” chapter in this guide.
The WebTrends Advanced Configuration Guide provides detailed information about custom
reports and translation files. For more information, see “Using Custom Reports” in this
guide.
To download these guides:
1. Open the WebTrends Admin Console and select Resource Center in the left pane.
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2. Click the WebTrends Documentation link.
3. Select the PDF for the chapter that you want to download.
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