We’re really getting into the world of analytics and here’s a challenge we’ve encountered recently. Given all the help that other bloggers like Justin at http://www.epikone.com/blog/and Robbin at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/ have provided, we thought we’d share a little knowledge too.

Here’s the situation. We are developing a site for a new client that wants to understand the value of their online newsletter. This is a fairly easy thing to do in Google Analytics – simply use their user-defined function by adding the pagetracker_setvar function in a newsletter sign-up confirmation page and start tracking how newsletter subscribers behave in comparison to non-subscribers.

But here’s the challenge – they already have a number of existing newsletter subscribers that won’t ever reach the newsletter confirmation page because they’ve already signed up. So how do we get them assigned as a newsletter subscriber?

This isn’t a coding problem per se – that part’s easy. It’s more of an implementation problem and it doesn’t appear that we can include the pagetracker_setvar code in an actual newsletter, so here is what we came up with as the best alternative.

Send out a special, one-time email to newsletter subscribers that informs them of the new site. The newsletter contains one link that drives them to a landing page that can only be accessed through the newsletter. Naturally this landing page contains the pagetracker_setvar code and updates a visitor’s cookie to tag them as a newsletter subscriber. Of course, we don’t want any non-subscribers being able to access the page or else their cookie will be updated with that value as well.

We recognize that we likely won’t get all our subscribers since some won’t respond to the email; however, it is a reasonable approach for capturing at least some.

We’ve toyed with some other ideas, but the above one appears to be the best at this point. If you know of any more, please let us know by leaving a comment!

Clay