How to Track Links in Email Campaigns: A Practical Guide

Email is one of the highest-ROI marketing channels for most businesses, but it is also one of the hardest to measure accurately. Your email platform tells you how many people opened an email and how many clicked a link. What it usually cannot tell you is what happened after that click — whether those visitors converted, purchased, or signed up. Without tracking that journey from email click to conversion, you are making budget and content decisions based on incomplete data.

Proper link tracking in email closes this gap. By tagging every link with UTM parameters and optionally using short links for clean URLs, you can trace each visitor from the specific email and link they clicked through to the conversion event in your analytics platform. This data shows you which emails drive actual business outcomes, not just opens and clicks.

Email link tracking happens at two separate levels, and understanding the difference helps you interpret your data correctly. The first layer is email platform click tracking: Mailchimp, Klaviyo, HubSpot, and most email platforms wrap your links in their own redirect URLs to count clicks. When someone clicks a link, the request goes to the email platform first, which records the click and redirects to your destination. This gives you click data inside the email platform dashboard.

The second layer is analytics click tracking via UTM parameters: when the visitor arrives on your website from the email click, your analytics platform (Google Analytics 4, Mixpanel, etc.) reads the UTM parameters from the URL and attributes the session to your email campaign. These two data layers show different things — the first shows who clicked inside the email, the second shows what those visitors did after arriving on your site.

Every link in every email should carry UTM parameters. The standard setup for email is: utm_source set to the newsletter name or your email service provider, utm_medium set to email, utm_campaign set to the specific email name or send date, and utm_content set to the link identifier so you can distinguish multiple links in the same email.

The utm_content parameter is especially valuable in email because the same landing page might be linked from the header logo, the hero CTA, the body text, and the footer button. Without utm_content, you see a total of four clicks attributed to the email but you cannot tell which placement drove them. With utm_content=header-logo, utm_content=hero-cta, utm_content=body-link, and utm_content=footer-button, you see exactly which link got clicked.

UTM-tagged links are long. A link to a landing page with four UTM parameters can easily exceed 150 characters. In plain-text email, long URLs wrap across lines and become unclickable. In HTML email, the visible link text can be anything, but the underlying URL still appears in hover tooltips and when email clients show the plain-text version. Long URLs also look unprofessional in forwarded emails.

Short links solve this. You create the full UTM-tagged URL, shorten it to a clean branded link, and use the short link in your email. The redirect is transparent — the browser follows the short link, lands on your page, and Google Analytics reads the UTM parameters from the final destination URL. You get the tracking data exactly as if you had used the long URL directly.

Short links in email also give you a second layer of click data at the link level, independent of your email platform. If your ESP click tracking is unreliable or you switch email providers, your short link click data provides continuity. You can also see clicks from email forwards — if someone forwards your email to a colleague who clicks the link, the click is recorded even though the forward is invisible to your ESP.

Open rate measures the percentage of delivered emails that were opened. It became less reliable as a metric after Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) in 2021, which pre-loads tracking pixels for all Apple Mail users whether or not they open the email. For senders with a large Apple Mail audience, open rates are significantly inflated. Use click rate as a more reliable engagement signal.

Click-to-open rate (CTOR) divides unique clicks by unique opens. It measures how compelling the email content was for people who opened it, independent of the open rate inflation problem. A high CTOR means the email body and CTA resonated with readers. A low CTOR on a high open rate often means the subject line over-promised what the email delivered.

In GA4, email sessions appear in the Traffic Acquisition report when your links carry utm_medium=email. Find them by navigating to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition and filtering by session medium is email. You will see sessions, engagement rate, conversions, and revenue attributed to email, broken down by campaign if you use utm_campaign.

For deeper attribution, use the User Acquisition report to see which email campaigns first acquired new users versus re-engaged existing ones. The Conversion Paths report in Advertising > Attribution shows email position in multi-touch journeys — whether email is typically a first-touch, mid-funnel, or last-touch channel for your conversions. This informs how you value email relative to paid and organic channels.

For teams sending more than a few emails per month, manually adding UTM parameters to every link in every email is error-prone and time-consuming. The solution is to build UTM tagging into your email workflow rather than treating it as a post-writing step.

Some email platforms like Klaviyo and HubSpot have built-in UTM auto-tagging that appends UTM parameters to all links automatically. If your platform supports this, enable it and configure the campaign parameter to use a variable tied to the email name. For platforms without auto-tagging, use a shared UTM builder spreadsheet or a dedicated tool where your team pastes destination URLs and generates tagged versions before inserting them into the email template.