How to Track Clicks on Your Email Campaigns (The Right Way)

Here's something email marketing platforms don't advertise very loudly: open rates are mostly made up.

Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (launched in 2021) pre-loads email images on Apple's servers, which is what most email tools use to detect an "open." So your open rate now includes everyone whose email was pre-fetched by Apple — whether they actually read it or not. For lists with a lot of iPhone and Mac users, this can inflate your open rates by 30–50%.

Clicks, on the other hand, are real. A click requires a human to actually tap or mouse-click a link. And if you set up click tracking correctly, you can get extremely useful data about which emails are actually driving action.

Here's how to do it properly.

What email click tracking actually measures

When you send an email through a platform like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, or any other ESP (email service provider), they automatically wrap every link in a redirect. When someone clicks a link in your email, the click goes through the ESP's server first, which records it, then redirects the user to the destination.

That's basic click tracking, and it works reasonably well for in-email analytics — you can see total clicks per link, per email.

The problem: this data stays inside your email platform. It doesn't automatically connect to your website analytics. So you might see "245 clicks" in Mailchimp, but your Google Analytics shows only 180 sessions from email. Which number is right? What happened to those 65 people?

This gap exists because the email click gets recorded by Mailchimp's server, but the session only gets recorded if the user's browser successfully fires your Google Analytics code — which doesn't happen when users have ad blockers, privacy browsers, or slow connections.

The fix: UTM parameters on every email link

Before you add any link to an email, add UTM parameters to it. UTM parameters are tracking labels embedded in the URL itself — they tell Google Analytics which email sent the traffic, regardless of what the browser blocks.

A tagged email link looks like this:

https://yoursite.com/blog-post?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=july_edition

When someone clicks this link and lands on your site, Google Analytics reads the UTM labels and records: "This visitor came from the July newsletter, via email." Even if your email platform's click tracking fails, the UTM data travels inside the URL and survives.

The three fields you need every time:

• utm_source — use something consistent like newsletter or weekly_email
• utm_medium — always email
• utm_campaign — the specific email: july_edition, product_launch, welcome_series

Use our Free UTM Builder to assemble these without typos. Typos here mean fragmented data in Google Analytics that you can never fix.

Adding a second layer: server-side click tracking

There's one more step that serious email marketers add: routing the link through a server-side tracker before it hits your site.

Here's what that looks like:

1. Build your destination URL with UTM parameters (step above)
2. Create a tracked short link in gometrify that points to that tagged URL
3. Use the gometrify short link in your email instead of the long URL

When someone clicks the link in the email:

• gometrify's server logs the click immediately (server-side — can't be blocked)
• The user is redirected to your page with the UTM tags intact
• Google Analytics records the session (client-side — might be missing some)
• Your email platform records the click (might be missing some too)

Now you have three data sources. The gometrify click count is your most accurate number — it's server-side and unblockable. The Google Analytics session count shows on-site behavior. The comparison between the two shows you how much data your analytics is missing.

Create a free gometrify account → to start tracking your email links at the server level.

How to actually analyze the results

After your email goes out, wait 48–72 hours for clicks to settle. Then look at:

In gometrify: Total clicks per link. Which links in the email got the most clicks? This is your most accurate click count.

In Google Analytics (GA4): Go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition. Filter by utm_campaign to see traffic from that specific email. Look at sessions, average engagement time, and conversion events.

In your email platform: Look at click-to-open rate (CTOR), not just click rate. CTOR tells you what percentage of people who actually opened the email clicked a link — which is more meaningful than raw click rate.

The comparison that matters: If gometrify shows 300 clicks but GA4 shows 200 sessions from the email, approximately 100 people clicked but didn't generate a trackable session. That's worth knowing — it tells you about the quality of your list and the technical accuracy of your analytics setup.

Common mistakes to avoid

Using the same UTM campaign name for multiple emails. Every email should have a unique utm_campaign value, otherwise you can't tell which email drove the traffic.

Not tagging unsubscribe links or footer links. You don't need to tag legal links, but every content link — blog posts, product pages, CTAs — should be tagged.

Forgetting to tag re-send campaigns. If you re-send to non-openers, use a different campaign tag (july_edition_resend) so you can compare performance of the two sends separately.