It can be useful to see how many people visit your website from links in your emails or Facebook posts. Especially when people opt-in to get something and don’t go directly to the Thank You page to pick it up, but later click the link in an email instead.
Google Analytics
Analytics shows the channels that people come in on, such as … Social, Direct, Referral and Organic.
But ! … you can also use an Email Channel to track the links in emails you send out. You can then watch the traffic by looking in Acquisition > Campaigns.
The Code
The extra data is appended to the website link following a “?” character, like this …
www.domain.com?utm_source=getresponse&utm_medium=email&utm_term=holidays&utm_campaign=10%+off
The extra data is referred to as UTM ( Urchin Traffic Monitor ) code and is the way that businesses track sales from their origination point ( like a tweet, email or a brochure ) down the funnel to their conversion page.
Five things you can track with UTM codes …
- Campaign: Groups all of the content from one campaign in your analytics. Eg: utm_campaign=20percentpromocode
- Source: Which website is sending you traffic. Eg: utm_source=Facebook
- Medium: The type of marketing medium that the link is featured in. Eg: utm_medium=socialmedia
- Content: Used to track the different types of content that point to the same URL from the same campaign, source, and medium codes. Often used in PPC or with two identical links on the same page. Eg: utm_content=sidebarlink or utm_content=headerlink
- Term: Used to identify the keywords you’ve paid for in a PPC ad. Eg: utm_term=marketing+software
How to track email clicks.
Most email apps and programs provide an option to add UTM code and when you turn the option on, then the links you include in emails have it appended.
[ For info, most .net servers don’t accept these in a URL, which makes Google Analytics tracking impossible, but Apache servers that most email apps run on are fine. ]
You can also use Googles URL builder ( https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/ ) to add UTM code to links in emails and from other places like Facebook posts.