UTM tags for email newsletters

Your email platform tells you how many people clicked. GA4 tells you what they did next. UTM tags are what join the two up. This guide shows how to tag a newsletter so you can see which issue, which story and which button brought people to your site, without spending an hour on it every month.

What untagged email looks like in GA4

Many people read email in apps that do not pass a referrer when a link is tapped. When that happens, GA4 cannot tell the visit came from your newsletter, so it is recorded as (direct) / (none). Even when a webmail service does pass a referrer, it names the email provider, not your newsletter, so you cannot tell one send from another.

Tagging fixes both problems. With tags, every click from every email program arrives labelled with the newsletter, the issue and the link.

The four values for email

Medium: always email

GA4's Email channel picks up visits where the source or medium is email, e-mail, e_mail or e mail. Choose email and never vary it. Values such as newsletter or mailchimp in the medium do not match that rule, so those visits fall into Unassigned instead of Email.

Source: the list, not the tool

Name the audience rather than the software. If you only have one list, newsletter is fine. If you send to different groups, name each one: supporter-news, volunteer-news, member-update. That way, if you change email platforms next year, your reports carry on without a break.

Campaign: the thing being promoted

This is where people disagree. Some use the issue name, such as november-newsletter. Others use the appeal or event the email is promoting. If the email is part of a wider campaign, use the campaign value so the email adds to the campaign's total alongside social and print. For a general newsletter with several stories, use the issue name.

Content: which link

A newsletter usually has several links to the same page: a header button, a text link in the story, a footer link. Give each a different utm_content value and you will learn which positions people actually use. That is often the most useful thing email tracking teaches you.

A worked example

A November supporter newsletter has three stories. The lead story is the winter appeal, with a button and a text link. The other two link to a volunteer page and a blog post.

https://example.org/winter-appeal?utm_source=supporter-news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2026-11-winter-appeal&utm_content=lead-button

https://example.org/winter-appeal?utm_source=supporter-news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2026-11-winter-appeal&utm_content=lead-text-link

https://example.org/volunteer?utm_source=supporter-news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2026-11-newsletter&utm_content=story-2

https://example.org/blog/garden-project?utm_source=supporter-news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2026-11-newsletter&utm_content=story-3

The appeal links use the appeal's campaign value, so they add to the appeal total. The other stories use the issue name. In GA4 you can see the appeal's email contribution next to its social and print results, and separately how the rest of the newsletter performed.

Check your email platform's settings

Many email platforms can add tracking parameters to links for you. That can save time, but it can also clash with tags you add yourself, leaving links with two sets of values or with source names you did not choose.

Before you start, look in your platform's campaign or tracking settings and decide on one approach:

• Let the platform tag: check what values it uses and whether they match your naming rules. Adjust the settings if you can.
• Tag yourself: switch the platform's automatic tagging off for those links, so only your values reach GA4.

Either works. Mixing the two is what causes confusing reports.

Links you do not need to tag

• Unsubscribe and preference links. These go to the email platform, not your site.
• "View in browser" links. Same again.
• Links to other people's websites. Your GA4 will not see those visits anyway. Tags on them only show up in the other site's analytics, so leave them off unless you have agreed it with them.

Opens and clicks are a different story

Your email platform's open rate and GA4's visit count will never match, and that is expected. Open rates have become less reliable in recent years because some email apps load images automatically for privacy reasons, which can count as an open without anyone reading. Clicks are a firmer signal, and visits in GA4 are firmer still because they show what people did after clicking.

If the platform shows 120 clicks and GA4 shows 95 visits from the same email, that gap is normal. Some people click twice, some close the page before it loads, and some decline analytics cookies. Compare trends between issues rather than expecting the two systems to agree exactly.

Plain-text emails and personal emails

The same rules apply to plain-text emails and to one-off messages you send from your own inbox, such as a thank-you email with a link to an impact report. Long tagged links look messy in plain text, so link to a short, readable page on your own site where you can, and tag the link inside your email program's link button rather than pasting the full address into the text. For personal emails, a single tagged link per message is enough; use a source such as staff-email so these visits are not mixed up with your newsletter.

A five-minute routine for each send

1. Before writing, decide the campaign value for each story.
2. Build the links in the UTM Builder: tick Newsletter, set the content field for each link and copy them in.
3. Send a test to yourself and click every tagged link.
4. Paste the links into your campaign log.
5. A week after sending, check GA4 for the source and compare content values.

For how email fits into a wider appeal, see Campaign tracking for charities.