Best Practices for Tracking Email Clicks Using Google Analytics

Email marketing is one of the most useful marketing tools used to generate valuable traffic and sales for e-commerce websites. Being such an important part of marketing, tracking click thrus and webpage visits through email can be very helpful to improve and measure the value of certain email campaigns over others.

Most email providers have a built-in functionality to track email clicks with Google Analytics, or their own email analytics dashboard. Sometimes it’s not enough to just track the number of clicks. So in this post, we will talk about manually tracking email clicks and user behavior using Google Analytics’ Advanced Segments for campaign tracking.

Google Analytics uses five standard URL parameters to track a particular campaign. The table below explains each of these parameters:

Helpful Information (source: Google URL Builder)

• Campaign Source
  (utm_source) Required. Use utm_source to identify a search engine, newsletter name, or other source.
  Example: utm_source=google
• Campaign Medium
  (utm_medium) Required. Use utm_medium to identify a medium such as email or cost-per- click.
  Example: utm_medium=cpc
• Campaign Term
  (utm_term) Used for paid search. Use utm_term to note the keywords for this ad.
  Example: utm_term=running+shoes
• Campaign Content
  (utm_content) Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. Use utm_content to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL.
  Examples: utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink
• Campaign Name
  (utm_campaign) Used for keyword analysis. Use utm_campaign to identify a specific product promotion or strategic campaign.
  Example: utm_campaign=spring_sale

You can use Google URL Builder to add these parameters to any specific link in your email.

Once you setup all these parameters to the link(s) you want to track, you can find any data related to this particular campaign in Google Analytics under Traffic Source > All Traffic, and search for the value of any of these parameters.

With these parameters, you can comprehensively analyze the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. Google Analytics’ Advanced Segments is an excellent tool to manually track email clicks and user behavior for campaign tracking.