Track Link Clicks with Google Analytics

Track link clicks in your emails and attribute those clicks back to the unique customer. This data is useful in aggregate to determine the response to your emails, including attributing purchases to sends, and also at the individual level to determine a user's engagement and interaction with Lifecycle Optimizer rules and Audience Builder filters.

All links will automatically be rewritten when they are included in your emails, wrapped in a unique tracking URL that uses the Link Domain you have set on your Settings Page. To activate link tracking for a given template or campaign, within its settings, simply ensure that the Link Tracking option is set to Yes. We recommend turning on link tracking; if link tracking is disabled, the attribution described above will not function.

As an example of how link tracking works, if your site's domain is example.com, your link domain might be set to link.example.com. When you include a link in your email to example.com/item/123, your email recipients will instead receive a link URL beginning with link.example.com and ending in a tracking code. When the user clicks, that click is logged and quickly redirects the user to the applicable page on your site, example.com/item/123.

If your account has multiple link domains, the link domain used to rewrite links is the one you set on your template Settings page.

Google Analytics Integration

If you set Use Google Analytics? to "Yes", then all links will add special utm parameters that will allow you to identify traffic coming from emails in Google Analytics. It is highly recommended to enable if you are using Google Analytics on your site.

  • A total of five parameters are automatically appended when you enable Google Analytics:
    • utm_campaign: will automatically be the name of the campaign as it appears in Engage by Sailthru.
    • utm_medium: will automatically be "email".
    • utm_source: will automatically be "Sailthru".
    • utm_term: will automatically be the name of the sending list as it appears in Engage by Sailthru.
    • utm_content: if you are sending an AB Split or AB Winner or Auto Winner Campaign, this utm parameter will be added to your links. For segment A, the value will be "A", for B, "B" and "Final" for the Final version of the AB Winner/Auto Winner test.
  • If you'd like to override the default value of email for utm_medium or add new utm parameters to your links, then go to the Advanced tab of your template/campaign. In the "Auto-Append Link Parameters" field write the new or current parameter with its respective value, such as utm_medium=MorningEmail
  • You can turn on this setting independent of the Link Tracking setting.

Note:

  • Not all website UTM parameters work properly with Google Analytics. Please see Google's help page on Custom Campaigns for more information.
  • Links to Hosted Pages are not tracked and are not included in reporting.