Why You Should Always Use Campaign Links in Your Emails

If you frequently send email newsletters to your subscribers, it's crucial that you use UTM parameters whenever linking to your website.

You see, email clients will hide the referrer data from the browser. That means when someone reaches your site from a link in an email, there's no way for tools like Independent Analytics to know where the visitor came from. For this reason, they'll end up getting grouped into your Direct traffic referrer. If you use UTM parameters, you can win back this data plus a lot more.

For instance, just today I sent this article to all of our subscribers, and I used the campaign builder like this to create the links that I used in the email. Because I did that, I was able to open up our Campaigns report and filter to find that specific campaign, and here I can see the number of visitors, views, and other engagement metrics for people who clicked on the links in that email.

I can also open up a dedicated report just for this campaign if I want to see information like the other pages that people viewed when they reached our site through the links in that email.

So if you don't use campaign links, then your email traffic is gonna show up as Direct, but if you make good use of campaign links, which only takes a few seconds with the campaign builder, you can win back all of this data and see exactly what your email visitors are doing on your website.