Tracking Clicks to Email via Google Tag Manager

Do you have a number of email links on your website such as this one – michael@glowmetrics.com – which uses “mailto:” at the beginning to directly open the user’s mail client to send an email? Most sites do but by default, they’re not tracking how many people actually click on them.

If you only have one email address on your site and you have access to those emails, you may not feel the need to track these clicks in Google Analytics – but if you have a contact page with multiple email addresses on it, it might be really useful to see who’s generating the most mail within your company. Google Analytics won’t track this by default, but here’s how to do it using Google Tag Manager.  It’s surprisingly simple!

Step 1: Create the Tag

Insert your own GA tracking ID when configuring the tag, feel free to use your own naming convention for the Event Category and Event Action but it’s important to use the {{Click URL}} variable for the Label – this will automatically pull in the email address included in the link the user clicked on so you can see that information in your Google Analytics event reports.

Step 2: Create the Trigger

We want to track whenever a user clicks specifically on an email link, so we’re using a Click Event trigger targeting ‘Just Links’.

The important part is the Fire On rule, which states the Click URL starts with “mailto:”.  This tells the tag to only fire whenever a user clicks on a link which has specifically been coded as an e-mail link on your website.  Seems obvious, right?

Once you’ve set up the tag and trigger, remember to publish your changes in GTM.  Then whenever you’ve done that, you should be able to see Email Links being tracked in your Google Analytics account like this:

Easy when you know how!  If you’ve got any questions on tracking Email Links or you would like more help with your Google Tag Manager set up, leave a comment below, use our Contact Us form or send us an email… 😉 We’d love to hear from you.