How to track the clicks of links contained in email signatures with analytics software & UTM parameters

Relevant Products: Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for Office 365 | Exclaimer Cloud - Signatures for G-Suite

Scenario

Your organisation would like to track the effectiveness of the email signatures you deploy with Exclaimer Cloud in regards to marketing or lead generation.

Resolution

With Exclaimer Cloud you can opt to employ an analytics software, e.g. Google Analytics, to track the clicks that your signatures generate. To do this, you can add UTM parameters into all your signatures' hyperlinks, such as social media icons and promotional banners. Below we explain why you might want to consider using analytics tracking in your signature and then show you an example of achieving this using a simple web page and Google Analytics.

Why should you track links in email signatures?

A corporate email signature can be designed to fulfil a marketing function of driving traffic to your website, social media channels and other web based resources. Tracking how many clicks your signature can generate to these places provides an excellent insight into how effective your design is at the very functions it was created for. Put simply, if these link clicks aren’t tracked, it’ll be hard to determine which banners and links are most effective.

Promotional banners used in emails signatures as part of a marketing campaign are just as important to track as any other advertising channel, particularly if you are A/B testing. Adding tracking URLs to your email signature marketing campaigns will allow you to evaluate how successful the campaign has been, and whether or not you should continue to use that banner or create a new one.

Process to Set-Up

In our example here, we will be using Google Analytics to generate a URL link with UTM parameters that we can then enter into Exclaimer Cloud. It is worth noting the experience should be comparable across different analytics software.

Generating Campaign Tracking URL

1. To begin our process we need to build our tracking URL for the campaign. Many analytics tools will use a Campaign URL Builder web page to handle this process. (e.g. Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder)
   
   
2. When using a campaign URL building tool, you will find a mix of required and optional fields to fill out in order to generate the campaign and associated link.
   
   
   
   
3. The website URL you need to specify should be one that directs to the landing page you want your image or text in the signature to link to. This URL must belong to a domain you have already set up within your analytics solution.
   
   
4. The remaining UTM Parameters will be added to the link generated and will be what enables the analytics software to provide accurate, reliable and meaningful information. Below is further information on each field, its corresponding UTM parameter and what it is used for.
   
   

   Field Name	UTM Tag	Purpose	Example
   Campaign Source	utm_source	Identify the source of the click in analytics	"salesteamsignature"
   Campaign Medium	utm_medium	Identify a medium for the source of the click	"email"
   Campaign Name	utm_campaign	Used for keyword analysis	"christmas_sale" "marketing_event"
   Campaign Term	utm_term	Used for paid search	"corporate+email+signatures"
   Campaign Content	utm_content	Used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads	"bannerlink" "logolink" "textlink"

   
   If you are including a promotional banner that is part of a wider marketing campaign, we recommend using the same Campaign Name (utm_campaign) for this banner as the other campaign assets (e.g. email or display advert).
   
5. Once all your fields are filled in as required, the builder will generate a campaign URL for use with the analytic software. It is this URL that we will want to contain as the hyperlink for the content in our signature.
   
   
   

    

Adding Campaign Tracking URL Into The Signature

Now that we have the tracking URL for our landing page we need to add it to the relevant content in our signature. To do this we will open up our signature and click on the content we are adding the hyperlink to. Below we cover the 3 most likely locations for such a hyperlink to assist; Images & Banners, Social Media Icons and Text.

Images & Banners

Social Media Icons

Text

Monitoring The Signature Effectiveness In The Analytics Solution

Once the tracking URL has been added to the signature and the signature has been active for at least 24 hours, or the campaign is over, we can analyse it in the analytics software.

If you have used Google Analytics for this campaign, head to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns, there you can see the Campaign Name, click on that to then see the results for the email signature.

If you’re running a promotional banner A/B test for a campaign and have set the Campaign Content (e.g. utm_content=banner1 & utm_content=banner2), you can compare the results by going to Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns and setting the Primary Dimension to Ad Content.