What is a Google Analytics trackable URL?

Google Mail Tracking for Analytics

Create a Google Analytics trackable URL and track email opens

Build your event code with this free online tool and track email opens in your Google Analytics account

Analytics Google Tracking script

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Fill in the form

Analytics ID account^*

Your Analytics account ID

Client ID

Identify your user

Event category

Track the event category such as "email"

Event action

Track the event action such as "open"

Path of tracked item

Path of the tracked item. Use %2 instead of slashes

Title of tracked item

Title of the tracked item. Use %20 instead of spaces

BUILD TRACKER

Create a Google Analytics trackable URL

Let's diving into step-by-step configuration

The following table gives you a detailed explanation and example of each of the event parameters. To learn more, check out the links in the related resources section below.

Set up a Google Analytics account

Before we can get started with an email tracking system, let’s start with the basics.

You need to have a Google Analytics account in order to be able to initiate google analytics email tracking.

Google Analytics works by tracking pages with special code. Most websites use it by including a JavaScript snippet in the header of the HTML code of the page, hidden from the eyes of website visitors.

When the page loads, the code sends information to Google about where the visitor came from, what he or she clicked on, and other demographic data like web browser and location.

Get started with Analytics

Create a Google Analytics trackable URL

Instead of using tracking code on a page, we're going to tell the email client to fetch an image.

But it's not a real image, it's just a 1x1 pixel that pings Google's servers.

That ping will be registered with Google Analytics, and we can see when someone has requested the "image." That of course means they've opened our email.

To get our fake image set up, we're going to need to create a special URL. Fill in the form to build your fake image code.

Include your image tag in the email body

Create your HTML body email and include the generated image code. It's just a 1x1 pixel that pings Google's servers and track email opens.

Use Google Analytics email tracking

To get started with the email tracking, open up Google Analytics again.

Go to go to the realtime analytics page. This will tell us exactly how well our email tracking is going.

Gmail accounts tries to prevent email tracking like this by saving a copy of the image and storing it for itself. This means that if someone re-opens the email, it won’t register.

This system works best with mailing programs like Apple Mail, Outlook, or ThunderBird.

To track how many total opens your email has gotten, head to the Google Analytics campaign tracking or Event behaviours sections.

Information and examples

Let's diving into each tracking parameter

Analytics ID account `Required`	Use the same Tracking ID as your site. This will allow Client IDs and User IDs to work across devices and media types. Example: UA-XXXX-Y
Client ID	The Client ID should be a random 64-bit integer. Google Analytics has separated its clientID into two 32-bit, unsigned, base-10 parts: 123456789.123456789. The measurement protocol supports larger UUIDs including alpha numeric characters.
Event category	Typically the object that was interacted with. Example: "email"
Event action	The type of interaction. Example: click_button, play_button, download, link...
Path of tracked item	All events can have a document path. Use document path, since emails don't conform to standard URLs. It will have to start with a forward slash (/) and be unique per email.
Title of tracked item	The document title should be the subject line of the email.