Google Analytics - Email Tracking Pixel/Beacon

Question

I'm interested in using Google Analytics to track my email opens

I've found this article here which is great, but I cant quite get my head around CLIENT_ID_NUMBER.

According to this page the Client ID is required and it is a " UUID "

But I don't understand why? Or what it does? I have my GA id, I can use the event_label field to add a unique identifier for my recipient, the campaign tags can be used to identify the specific email (much like I use on my links in the email).

Can I just generate one UUID and use that for every recipient of every email? Or does every recipient for my email require a randomly generated UUID of their own? Does this somehow group sessions so every recipient and every email needs their own unique UUID?

Arrggghhh, confused. Help much appreciated!

Cheers :)

Answer 1

You can create a client id randomly (does not even have to be in the UUID format). However you want at least a distinct id per user, or every opened mail will be attributed to the same user.

However the real neat thing to do is to use the client id from the website - that is if your users have subscribed via an online form. You get the client id from the analytics cookie during the subscription process, pass them on to the mail system and insert them into your "web bug". That should allow you to connect the email view to some previous user behaviour.

Image tracking in e-mails is somewhat unreliable for webmail clients - these cache the images in the emails which might invalidate some of the data (ie location, you will get the location of the caching server).