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If you are running a business website to attract new clients or customers almost any activity on your site could lead to that vital first contact.
For simple websites without shopping carts or forms one of the most important activities may be the humble “click here to contact us by email”… known in HTML as the mailto: function. Many simple company sites use this simple bit of code to let visitors to their websites contact them.
Learn how to track where email inquiries come from.
You can easily track how many people click and send you an email by simply counting them in your inbox. As your sales department follows up on these leads and contacts them, you will be able to assess the conversion rate. Put the conversion rate together with the average order value for sales from these leads you can attach a dollar value to the mailto: clicks.
Did you know that you can also track these clicks in Google Analytics and learn where they came from in the first place? Yup… and I’m going to show you how by creating a mailto: onclick event.
Knowing how customers originally found you is important!
Knowing the source of your email inquiries… paid adwords, banners, organic search, social network hubs, etc, lets you know which of your traffic driving efforts are paying off. And when you know what sources are paying off, you can direct more time and attention to them. Plus, it can help you eliminate time wasters (and money wasters) and improve your efficiency.
How to track mailto: clicks in Google Analytics:
Step 1: Modify the Google Analytics code you have placed on your site to include an exitTracker object.
Step 2: Now modify your mailto: links to trigger an onclick event that Google can track. 
What Google Analytics will show you
This tiny little bit of code creates a report in Google Analytics that looks something like this:
You may be tracking other events on your site so you will also get a subcategory. You could also use this to separately track clicks from different pages... Click-Email-Pg1. All you have to do is modify the code example above.
You now also have a record of the specific email clicked... again lots of opportunity for variations it you feel you need it.
With this handy trick you can now capture every email lead and track it back to the original source. Now you can find out what traffic source is driving those email inquiries… and do more of it! |
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