Heisenberg uncertainty principle in e-mail campaigns

Heisenberg uncertainty principle in e-mail campaigns analytics

We have been experiencing something quite paradoxical with our e-mail campaigns and Google Analytics. To track an e-mail campagin with GA you need to append some long parameters to the URLs, like

http://es.makoondi.com/ofertas_habitacion/new?utm_campaign=newoffer&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pcom

for the base URL:

http://es.makoondi.com/ofertas_habitacion/new

And, yes, we could track this campaign. But we noticed that our campaign was less effective since we started measuring it. It looks like our target doesn’t like so long URLs.

Then we tried to use bit.ly, to shorten the URL:

http://bit.ly/rEl0r

And the result was terrible. People like these cryptic urls even less than the long ones.

So, we decided that we couldn’t mesure the effectivity of the campaign without altering it (in the plain text emails). We aren’t measuring it anymore, but the results are better. And since that is what counts…