Some things work much better when there’s a common way of communicating. For instance, a Danish friend works in Copenhagen with a team of experts from all over Europe. There are Danes, Swedes, Brits and Kiwis, with the owners based in Finland. Just imagine the confusion if each person tried to speak the language of the person they were talking to!

Fortunately, the Finns are smarter than that and decreed that English would be the common language. So clarity reigns, the native English speakers breathe a sigh of relief, and the business thrives.

You may be surprised to hear that your email marketing and website analytics speak different languages too. One talks of opens, clicks, soft bounces and unsubscribers, while the other lists page views, conversions and sessions within its mass of stats. When each works in isolation, all is fine. It’s just when they have to talk with each other that we have confusion that could cost you dearly.

For instance, let’s say you send an email newsletter that contains standard links to your website. Ideally, you would hope, your website analytics application will see each piece of traffic, know it is from your email campaign and help you report on it separately.

Unfortunately, it can’t do that. And that’s an issue.

Why? Because even though email marketing may be old and crunchy, it’s still one of the main ways that e-commerce companies drive revenue. Same with service businesses. And any venture that relies on repeat or referral business.

So having Google Analytics reveal that your last email campaign delivered 70% of your sales for the month is handy indeed. And knowing that your prospect newsletter produced 15 quote requests and 500 downloads of your latest PDF report would make most business owners sit back and smile.

So the question is, how do you get your website marketing and website analytics tools to talk to each other so you can actually get your hands on this information? Well, it’s easier than you might think. And it pays to think like a Finn.

Here’s what you do. You decree a common language and then you have everyone speak it. In this case, it’s email that acquiesces and ends up “speaking” Google Analytics.

The mechanism is some scary looking pieces of code added to the end of every link to your website. Then your Google Analytics application sees each piece of traffic coming from your email marketing campaign and slots it into the Campaign Reporting area of your Google Analytics account.

Thankfully, some email marketing applications make adding the code super easy – think Responsys, Campaign Monitor and MailChimp . You just need to know how to configure each so you don’t scratch your head to decipher it when you come across it in your Google Analytics account. By the way, if your application is not listed, head over to this page from Google where you can create the links yourself.

Once your email marketing traffic is nicely recorded in Campaigns within your Google Analytics account, your reporting options explode. Sales, quote requests, video plays, PDF document downloads – whatever you track for all your other website traffic – can be assessed by the results delivered by just your email activity. Baboom! All because you got the two of them speaking the same language.

Give it a go today – and if you are struggling, give us a call. Every day we work with companies who see the benefit of enabling all their online marketing – not just their email marketing – to speak the same language.