How to Track Email Campaigns with UTM Parameters

You send a newsletter, a few people click through, and a sale happens a day later. Which email deserves the credit? Without UTM parameters, Google Analytics will usually lump that visit under something vague like "email" or "direct", and you will have no way to tell whether your welcome email, your weekly newsletter or a one-off promotion did the work.

UTM parameters fix that. They are short tags you add to a link so Analytics can record exactly where a click came from. In this guide, you will learn which parameters to use for email, how to name them consistently, how to build a tracked link, and how to check the results in GA4.

Why email tracking needs UTMs

Most email tools already tell you open and click rates, but they cannot tell you what happened after the click. Did readers buy, sign up or leave after ten seconds? Analytics can answer that, but only if it knows the visit came from email in the first place.

That is the problem UTMs solve. When someone clicks a tagged link, the tags travel with them to your site and are stored as the session's source, medium and campaign. Without them, email traffic is often reported as direct traffic, which makes email look far less effective than it really is. With them, every email has a clear, comparable record.

The five UTM parameters — and the four you need for email

• utm_source — who sent the traffic. For email, use the name of your email tool or list, for example mailchimp, convertkit or newsletter.
• utm_medium — the channel. For email, this is almost always email.
• utm_campaign — the specific email or series, for example november-newsletter or welcome-series.
• utm_content — what was clicked, for example header-button, hero-image or footer-link. Use this when one email has several links to the same page.
• utm_term — the keyword, mainly for paid search. You can leave this out for email.

Only the first three are essential, but utm_content is very useful. It tells you whether people clicked the main call to action or a small text link at the bottom.

Naming rules that keep your reports clean

UTM values are case-sensitive, so Email, email and EMAIL appear as three different mediums in GA4. Pick one style and stick to it. Lowercase, with hyphens instead of spaces, is the safest choice.

Keep names short, descriptive and consistent. Use welcome-series every time, not welcome_series one week and welcome-series-2 the next. Agree the pattern before you send anything: source is the tool, medium is always email, campaign is the email name, and content is the link position.

Avoid spaces and special characters, and do not change a campaign name halfway through a series. If you do, GA4 will split the results and you will have to add them together by hand.

A worked example

Suppose you run a small online shop and send a November newsletter with a 20% discount. The main button links to your sale page. A clean set of values would be:

• Source: mailchimp
• Medium: email
• Campaign: november-newsletter
• Content: main-offer-button

That gives you this link:

https://example.com/sale?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=november-newsletter&utm_content=main-offer-button

If the same email also links to the sale page from a text link lower down, keep the first three values the same and change only utm_content to text-link. Now GA4 can show you which link earned more clicks and, more importantly, which one earned more sales. That is a far better test than guessing from click totals alone.

Building the link without typing it by hand

You do not need to assemble these URLs manually, and you should not — a missing ? or & breaks the whole tag. Paste your destination URL into a UTM builder, fill in source, medium, campaign and content, and copy the finished link into your email.

You can use the free Quicklity UTM Builder for this. It builds the link in the correct format, so you only have to think about the values, not the punctuation. Always test the finished link before you send: click it, check that it opens the right page, and check that the UTM values are still in the address bar.

Checking the results in GA4

Give GA4 a day to process the data, then go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. Look for the session source/medium mailchimp / email, then add campaign as a secondary dimension or use the search box to filter for november-newsletter.

Compare campaigns on the numbers that matter: sessions, engaged sessions, conversions and revenue, not just clicks. A campaign with fewer clicks but more purchases is the better campaign. You can also build an Exploration report, breaking the same campaign down by utm_content to compare each link.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Tagging internal links. Only tag links in the email itself. Never add UTMs to links inside your own website — they will start a new session and distort your source data.
• Using a different campaign name for every send. A series should share one campaign name so you can see its total result.
• Inconsistent capitalisation. Decide on lowercase once, and do not vary it.
• Forgetting to test. Send yourself a test email and click every tracked link before the real send.
• Judging by clicks alone. A link can win on clicks and lose on sales. Always check conversions too.

Start with your next email

You do not need a new tool or a complicated setup to track email properly. Pick one naming pattern, apply it to your next email, and check the result in GA4 the following day. After two or three sends, you will know which offers and link positions actually bring people back to your site — and which ones only look busy. That is the difference between sending email and learning from it.