How to Track Email Marketing with Google Analytics

Your email marketing platform tells you who opened and clicked, but what they do next is often a mystery. To understand the true impact of your emails - from the articles they read to the products they buy - you need to connect a few dots. This article will show you exactly how to use Google Analytics to track your email marketing performance, revealing which campaigns actually drive sessions, conversions, and revenue for your business.

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What Your ESP Tells You vs. What Google Analytics Reveals

Your Email Service Provider (ESP), whether it's Klaviyo, Mailchimp, or HubSpot, gives you great data about the performance of your emails themselves. You get metrics like:

• Open Rate: How many subscribers opened your email.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): How many subscribers clicked a link inside.
• Unsubscribe Rate: How many people opted out.

This is crucial information for gauging email engagement. But once someone clicks a link and lands on your website, your ESP's tracking capabilities more or less stop. You know they clicked, but you don't know the most important part: what they did after they clicked.

That’s where Google Analytics 4 comes in. By tracking your email traffic in GA4, you can answer critical business questions:

• Which email campaigns drive the most revenue?
• Do subscribers from my welcome series spend more time on my site than those from my weekly newsletter?
• How many email clicks lead to a lead form submission or a free trial signup?
• Is my "Flash Sale" campaign bringing in new users or just reactivating existing ones?
• What’s the average order value for customers who come from email versus social media?

In short, GA4 shows you the entire user journey, transforming email from a dispatch tactic into a measurable growth channel.

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The Magic Behind it All: UTM Parameters

To get this valuable data, you need to add special tracking tags to the links in your emails. These tags are called UTM parameters, and they act like little notes an email subscriber carries with them when they visit your site. GA4 reads these notes and uses them to categorize the traffic, telling you exactly where each visitor came from.

There are five standard UTM parameters, but for email, you'll mainly focus on three:

• utm_medium: This is the marketing channel. For all email traffic, you should always set this to email. This consistency is vital for grouping all your email efforts together in GA4 reports.
• utm_source: This tells you where the traffic came from more specifically. It could be the name of your ESP (like klaviyo), the type of email (like newsletter), or a specific list segment (like active-subscribers).
• utm_campaign: This identifies a specific promotion or campaign. This is where you get granular. Use names like spring-sale-2024, black-friday-promo, or monthly-digest-june.

You may also occasionally use the other two for even deeper insights:

• utm_content: Use this to differentiate links within the same email campaign. For instance, if you have two calls-to-action, you could use top-banner-cta and footer-link-cta to see which one performs better.
• utm_term: This is typically used for tracking keywords in paid search ads, so you can usually ignore it for email marketing.

Combining these parameters creates a trackable URL that's ready for your email campaign.

Three Golden Rules for UTMs

Before you start building, remember these rules to keep your data clean and accurate:

1. Be Consistent: Google Analytics is case-sensitive. It sees newsletter and Newsletter as two entirely different traffic sources. Pick a format - typically all lowercase - and stick with it across all your campaigns.
2. Use Hyphens, Not Spaces: Spaces in URLs can cause strange formatting issues. Use hyphens (-) or underscores (_) instead. For example, use black-friday-sale instead of black friday sale.
3. Keep it Simple and Readable: You should be able to look at your campaign names in GA4 and know exactly what they refer to. bfcm-2024-promo is much clearer than campaign-112-final.

How to Create Trackable URLs for Your Emails

Manually typing out UTM parameters is a recipe for typos. The best way to create them is with a URL builder tool. Google provides a free, easy-to-use tool called the Campaign URL Builder.

Let's walk through an example. Imagine you're sending your monthly newsletter promoting a new blog post about "Summer Gardening Tips."

Step-by-Step with Google's Campaign URL Builder

1. Go to the GA4 Campaign URL Builder page.
2. Enter your destination URL: This is the webpage where you want to send people who click the link. For our example, let's use: https://www.yourgardeningblog.com/summer-gardening-tips
3. Fill in your UTM parameters:

You can leave campaign_term blank. For campaign_content, you might use header-link if it's the main link in your email.

1. See your new URL appear: The tool will automatically generate your fully tagged URL at the bottom of the page. It will look like this: https://www.yourgardeningblog.com/summer-gardening-tips?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=june-2024-digest&utm_content=header-link
2. Use this link in your email campaign: Copy this new URL and use it as the hyperlink for your buttons, images, and text links in your email platform. When a subscriber clicks it, GA4 will now know exactly where they came from.

Pro Tip: Many ESPs like HubSpot and Mailchimp have features to automatically add UTM tags to your links. This is a great time-saver, but it's still essential to understand how they work so you can ensure your data is being tagged correctly.

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How to Find Your Email Marketing Data in GA4

Once your campaigns are running and you've been sending traffic to your site with your new trackable links, you can dive into GA4 to see the results.

The primary place to find your campaign data is in the Traffic acquisition report.

Navigate to the Traffic Acquisition Report

1. From your GA4 home screen, click on Reports in the left-hand navigation menu.
2. Under the Life cycle section, go to Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
3. This report initially shows you traffic grouped by "Session default channel group." You can see the built-in "Email" channel here, which includes any traffic where the medium is 'email'.

To see your specific campaign performance, you need to change the primary dimension:

1. At the top of the report chart, click the dropdown menu that says "Session default channel group."
2. In the search box, type "campaign" and select Session campaign.

Now, you’ll see a list of all your campaign names - including the email campaign names you created with the URL builder. On this screen, you can analyze key metrics for each campaign:

• Users & Sessions: The amount of traffic each campaign is driving.
• Engaged sessions: A session that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least 2 pageviews. This helps you gauge the quality of the traffic.
• Conversions: The number of times users from a campaign completed a key action you've set up, like a purchase or a form submission.
• Total revenue: If you have e-commerce tracking enabled, this will show you exactly how much money each email campaign generated. This is the holy grail of email ROI tracking.

Drilling Down a little Deeper

From the Session campaign report, you can level up your analysis by adding a secondary dimension. Click the little blue "+" icon next to the primary dimension dropdown and search for "Session source / medium." This will show you exactly which source/medium combination is driving performance for each campaign. It’s a great way to double check and segment your data.

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Creating a Dedicated Email Performance Report

While the Traffic acquisition report is powerful, flipping between different dimensions can be tedious. A much more efficient approach is to build a simple, reusable report in GA4's Explore section.

Here’s how to create a custom report just for your email campaigns:

1. Navigate to Explore in the left sidebar and click on Blank report.
2. In the "Variables" column on the left, you'll need to "import" the dimensions and metrics you want to use:
3. In the "Tab Settings" column in the middle, it's time to build your report:
4. Finally, let's filter this report to show only email traffic:

In roughly 60 seconds, you’ve just built a custom, live report that shows all of your email campaigns and their most important KPIs in one clean view. You can rename this exploration "Email Performance Dashboard," and it will be saved for you to access any time.

Final Thoughts

Connecting your email service provider’s data with Google Analytics is the key to understanding the real value of your marketing efforts. By consistently using UTM parameters, you remove the guesswork and can clearly see which campaigns are attracting high-quality traffic, driving customer actions, and generating revenue for your business.

Once you get used to this setup, the only challenge is the time it takes to jump between your ESP, Google Analytics, social ad platforms, and CRM to piece the entire customer journey together. To simplify this, we built a tool that connects to all of your data sources - like Google Analytics, Shopify, Klaviyo, and Facebook Ads - in a few clicks. With Graphed, you can ask questions like, "Create a report showing revenue from our last three email campaigns" in plain English and get an instant, real-time dashboard. We found it’s the fastest way to get insights without spending hours wrangling data.