How to Track Email Link Clicks: A Step-by-Step Guide for Marketers

Adding clickable links to your email campaigns can help drive traffic, conversions, and sales. But how do you know which links resonate best with your audience? Link tracking provides the answer.

In this guide, I’ll walk through what link tracking is, why it’s useful for email marketing, and simple steps for implementing email link tracking in your campaigns.

By the end, you’ll have the knowledge to start tracking and optimizing your email links to boost results.

What is Email Link Tracking?

Email link tracking allows you to monitor how many subscribers click on links within your email content It provides key metrics like

• Number of total clicks on each link
• Click-through rate showing percentage clicked
• Which links get the most clicks

Link tracking gives visibility into how your readers interact with links. You can discover your most popular content to feature more prominently.

Tracking at the individual link level provides much deeper insight compared to just overall open and click rates. This lets you refine content and boost click-throughs.

Most email service providers include built-in link tracking. You can also use free tools like Bitly and Google Analytics.

Why Track Email Link Clicks?

Here are powerful reasons why email link click tracking should be part of your campaigns:

• See your highest performing content
• Identify which topics resonate with your audience
• Cut low-performing links that don’t engage readers
• Personalize future content based on interest
• Refine calls-to-action that drive action
• Fix broken links that get low clicks
• Compare subject lines by link clicks
• Calculate return on investment of content

Without link monitoring in place, you’re essentially flying blind and missing out on optimization opportunities.

Step 1: Identify Your Audience

The first step is getting clear on your target audience and buyers. Ask yourself:

• Who are my main customer demographics?
• What messaging resonates with them?
• What challenges or needs do they have?
• What content types (articles, videos, etc) do they prefer?

Gaining a deep understanding of your ideal audience will allow you to create content and choose links tailored to their interests in your emails.

Step 2: Build Your Email Campaign

The next step is developing compelling email campaigns with tracking links:

• Have a purpose – Make sure your emails have a clear call-to-action, whether it’s promotions, guides, or driving newsletter sign-ups.

• Personalize content – Use merge tags, segments, and other personalization to make content relevant to subscribers.

• Focus on engagement – Choose links you believe will provide value and capture interest for each audience.

• Use concise language – Write short, catchy descriptions for each link that makes readers want to click.

• Track CTA buttons too – Any call-to-action buttons should also have tracking enabled.

Putting together targeted, high-quality email campaigns maximizes the chance of getting clicks on links.

Step 3: Set Up a Link Tracking Journey

Don’t just track one-off emails – implement link tracking across multiple touchpoints in an automated email journey:

• Welcome Series – Track clicks in your onboarding welcome emails to buyers. See what piques interest during this honeymoon phase.

• Promotional Series – Use link tracking on your promotional or seasonal campaigns. Identify popular products.

• Newsletters – Monitor clicks within your ongoing newsletters to determine reader preferences.

• Abandoned Cart Series – Analyze links in your cart abandonment emails to troubleshoot and bring back customers.

Analyzing links over the entire lifecycle produces more insights than one-off emails. You can segment based on factors like subscriber lifecycle stage.

Step 4: Create UTM Tracking Codes

To properly track links in email, you need to tag them with campaign parameters called UTM codes:

• UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, named after an old web analytics tool purchased by Google.

• The codes append link URLs with labels that identify the email campaign, content, link location and other details.

• This allows your analytics platform like Google Analytics to categorize the clicks for reporting.

Your email service and analytics tools usually include options to auto-generate UTM codes for your links. But you can also easily create them manually.

Here is an example UTM structure:

http://www.website.com?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email_marketing&utm_campaign=summer_promo

This tags the link with the UTM source, medium, and campaign name.

Step 5: View Email Link Tracking Reports

Once your campaigns are running, you can start tracking and analyzing link click data:

• Email platform reports – Most email services like MailChimp provide click and open rate reports per link and campaign. Review these regularly.

• Analytics software – Integrate your email service with Google Analytics to access detailed tracking dashboards, including geo data and conversion points.

• UTM builder tools – Convenient UTM generators like MakeUTM.io can also display click reports and shorten URLs.

• Bitly – This popular link management tool provides click stats and historical tracking.

Analyze your high-performing and low-performing links to shape future content strategy and email focus.

Summary

Here are the key points for implementing effective email link tracking:

• Know your audience and create targeted, relevant content
• Ensure all links are tagged with campaign tracking codes
• Track links consistently across campaigns and lifecycle journeys
• Monitor click-through rate data and optimize low performers
• Use insights to refine content, CTAs, and personalization
• Link tracking powers optimization and maximizes email results

Adding just small UTM tags to your links unlocks a goldmine of data to boost your email marketing. Start tracking today!