Tracking Link Clicks in Email Signatures

Mar 05, 2020

Usually link tracking is all about analytics and is inherent to web sites. What about email signatures? If you or your organization use a branded email signature that may contain some promotional information with a link, it makes sense to track them too.

Email is still an important element in communicating and establishing relationships.

Branded email signatures that contain links are another source of traffic to your site. And you might want to know if the recipients of your email are clicking on your links.

If you or your organization is sending hundreds of emails, it will be difficult for you to determine which promotional information is most effective.

Banners or links used in email signatures can be part of an advertising campaign. Typically, advertising campaigns conduct A/B tests to determine which advertising was most effective. Therefore, adding URL tracking to email signatures will allow you to get analytical data and evaluate how successful the campaign was.

Depending on the analytics platform you use, it will be possible to create campaign tracking URLs. We have made it easy for you to create such links using our tool URL Builder.

With the Builder URL, you will select custom parameters, often known as UTM tags. The UTM tags are what you will use to identify the traffic source within Google Analytics.

The different parameters are:

  • utm_source: Use this to identify where the traffic came from, e.g. email_signature_ad
  • utm_medium: This identifies the medium, e.g. email
  • utm_campaign: Typically the name of the campaign, such as a product promotion, e.g. workshop, summer_seminar
  • utm_term: Use this for paid ads to define the keyword, e.g. scientific_event (optional)
  • utm_content: Use this for A/B testing and content-targeted ads, e.g. banner1 (optional)

Once the advertising campaign is complete, you can view the analytics in Google Analytics.

Have a successful advertising campaign!