How to Connect Mailchimp to Google Analytics

Sending emails through Mailchimp is just the first step, understanding what happens after a subscriber clicks a link is where the real value lies. By connecting Mailchimp to Google Analytics, you can finally see which campaigns drive traffic, which newsletters lead to sales, and how your email subscribers behave once they land on your site. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up this crucial connection and start tracking your email marketing success.

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Why Connect Mailchimp to Google Analytics?

Connecting these two platforms moves you from guessing to knowing. Without tracking, you see open rates and click-through rates in Mailchimp, but the trail goes cold from there. You can’t tell if that email with a 30% click rate actually resulted in any revenue or just a lot of window shopping.

When you link them, you unlock a much clearer picture of your email marketing's return on investment (ROI). You can answer critical business questions like:

• Which campaigns drive the most traffic? See exactly how many users each email sends to your website.
• Which newsletters generate actual revenue? If you have an e-commerce store, you can track sales and revenue directly back to a specific email campaign.
• How do email subscribers interact with my site? See which pages they visit, how long they stay, and if they complete key actions (like filling out a form or watching a video).
• Where should I focus my email efforts? By seeing what works, you can double down on successful campaign types and stop wasting time on ones that don’t perform.

The bridge between Mailchimp and Google Analytics is built using something called UTM parameters. Let's break down what those are.

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Understanding UTM Parameters: The Key to Tracking

If you’ve ever seen a long, complicated-looking URL after clicking a marketing link, you’ve likely seen UTM parameters in action. "UTM" stands for "Urchin Tracking Module," a name left over from the company Google acquired to create Google Analytics.

Think of them as simple tags you add to the end of a URL. These tags don't change the destination page, but they give Google Analytics specific information about where the user came from. They are the language GA understands for traffic attribution.

There are five standard UTM parameters, but for Mailchimp, you'll primarily use three:

• utm_source: Identifies the source of your traffic. For our purposes, this will be 'mailchimp'.
• utm_medium: Identifies the marketing medium or channel. In this case, it will always be 'email'.
• utm_campaign: Identifies the specific campaign, like 'december-newsletter' or '25-off-flash-sale'.

For more detailed tracking, you might also use:

• utm_content: Useful for A/B testing elements within a single email. For example, you could tag a link in your header image as 'header-link' and a button CTA as 'main-cta-button' to see which one gets more clicks.
• utm_term: Primarily used for paid search to identify specific keywords, so it's less relevant for email marketing.

Putting it all together, a link might look like this:

https://www.yourwebsite.com/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=winter-sale-2024

That looks complicated to build manually for every link, but the good news is you don’t have to. Mailchimp has a simple, built-in feature to do this automatically.

Method 1: Toggling on Mailchimp’s Built-in Tracking

This is the fastest and easiest way to get started. Mailchimp can automatically add the core UTM parameters to every link in your campaign.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Log in to Mailchimp and either create a new email campaign or edit an existing draft.
2. Navigate to the bottom of the campaign editor page until you see the Settings & Tracking section. Click the "Edit" button.
3. Scroll down through the tracking options until you find the heading Google Analytics link tracking.
4. Simply check the box next to "Enable Google Analytics link tracking."

That's it! When this setting is enabled, Mailchimp will automatically append the following to all links in your email:

• utm_source=mailchimp
• utm_medium=email
• utm_campaign=[Your Campaign Title] - This is automatically pulled from the name you gave your campaign in Mailchimp.

A small text box below the checkbox allows you to customize the campaign name used in the UTM tag if you want it to be different from your internal Mailchimp campaign title. For most uses, leaving this as the default is perfectly fine. The key is to name your campaigns clearly and consistently in Mailchimp (e.g., "Weekly Newsletter - 2024-10-26," not just "newsletter").

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Method 2: Manually Adding UTM Parameters for More Control

The built-in Mailchimp feature is excellent for general tracking, but what if you want to know which specific link within your email performs best? For that, you’ll need to override the default settings and add your own UTM parameters, particularly utm_content.

This is perfect for tests like:

• Comparing a text link to a button CTA.
• Seeing if a link at the top of the email performs better than one at the bottom.
• Tracking clicks on different product images.

Using Google's Campaign URL Builder

The easiest way to create these custom URLs is with Google's free Campaign URL Builder. Here's how to use it:

1. Website URL: Enter the full URL of the page you want to link to (e.g., https://www.yourstore.com/special-offer).
2. campaign_source: Enter mailchimp (always use lowercase and be consistent).
3. campaign_medium: Enter email.
4. campaign_name: Enter the name of your campaign, like weekly-roundup-october.
5. campaign_content (optional): This is where the magic happens. Give your link a descriptive name, like hero-image-link or promo-button-cta.

As you fill out the form, the tool will generate the fully tagged URL at the bottom. Copy this URL and paste it directly into the Mailchimp email editor as the destination for your button, image, or text link. Repeat this process for each unique link you want to track with a different utm_content tag.

Where to Find Your Mailchimp Data in Google Analytics 4

Once you've sent a campaign with a UTM-tagged link and people have started clicking, where do you find the results? Here's how to locate your campaign data in GA4.

Finding Campaign Performance Data

1. Log into your Google Analytics 4 property.
2. On the left-hand navigation menu, go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
3. By default, this report groups traffic by "Session default channel group." This isn't what we want. Above the data table, click the primary dimension dropdown menu (it will say 'Session default channel group').
4. In the search box, type and select Session campaign.

The report will now show a list of all your campaign names, including the ones you set in Mailchimp! Here, you can see metrics like Users, Sessions, Engaged sessions, and, most importantly, Conversions and Total revenue associated with each email campaign.

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Drilling Down with Secondary Dimensions

To verify the data or get more granular, you can add a secondary dimension.

• Click the small "+" icon next to the 'Session campaign' dropdown.
• In the search box that appears, you can add "Session source," "Session medium," or "Session creative." 'Creative' is another name for utm_content.
• Adding "Session creative / ``utm_content```" allows you to see the A/B test results for the specific links you tagged manually.

Tying It All Together: A Practical Example

Let's make this real. Imagine you run an online plant shop and you send a St. Patrick's Day promo email.

1. You name the campaign in Mailchimp: "Lucky Greens Sale - March 2024".
2. You enable the built-in Google Analytics tracking. This automatically sets utm_campaign=Lucky_Greens_Sale_March_2024 (Mailchimp often replaces spaces with underscores).
3. You send the email. Your subscribers click through and a few of them buy pots and plants.
4. The next day, you log in to GA4 and go to the Traffic acquisition report.
5. You change the primary dimension to Session campaign.
6. You find the entry for "Lucky_Greens_Sale_March_2024" in the table. You see it brought in 540 users, resulted in 65 purchase events, and generated $1,850 in revenue.

Just like that, you've moved from "I hope this email works" to "I know this email generated $1,850." You can now compare this performance against your other campaigns to see what messages, offers, and products resonate most with your audience.

Final Thoughts

Connecting Mailchimp to Google Analytics is a fundamental step toward building a data-driven marketing strategy. By using UTM parameters - either automatically through Mailchimp's native integration or manually for more detail - you gain invaluable insights into how your subscribers engage with your brand beyond the initial click.

While seeing this data organized inside of Google Analytics is a huge leap forward, it's still just one piece of your overall business puzzle. We've found that one of the biggest challenges for teams is combining email performance with data from other tools like Shopify, Facebook Ads, or HubSpot without spending hours in spreadsheets. With Graphed, you connect all your data sources once, then use simple natural language to build dashboards and get answers in seconds. You can ask things like, "What was my customer acquisition cost for the March email campaign versus my March Facebook Ads?" and instantly get a report that helps you make faster, smarter decisions about where to invest your budget and time.