Track Emails with Google Analytics in These 5 Steps

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for website and visitor analytics, but it was not designed for email tracking. You can use it to track email opens for marketing campaigns and specific sales emails through a workaround involving the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol, but the process is technical, has significant limitations, and does not cover email productivity metrics. This guide walks through exactly what Google Analytics can and cannot track for email, how to set up the tracking that is possible, and when you should use a different tool instead.

What Does “Email Tracking” Mean in Google Analytics?

The phrase “email tracking” can mean different things depending on your role. An email marketer might interpret it as analyzing the performance of an email campaign — measuring opens, clicks, and other email marketing metrics to maximize ROI. A salesperson might think of it as determining how a lead interacts with a specific email — whether they opened the message or downloaded an attachment.

There is also a broader category of email tracking: understanding how your team uses email operationally. This includes analyzing the number of emails sent and received throughout the day, calculating average email response times, and identifying patterns in email traffic by hour and day of the week.

Google Analytics can help with the first category — tracking opens for a specific email campaign — through a pixel-based workaround. It cannot help with team email productivity metrics. For that, you need a dedicated tool that integrates directly with your email accounts and generates a comprehensive Gmail report covering volume, response times, and behavioral patterns.

How Do You Set Up Email Tracking with Google Analytics?

Step 1: Set up a Google Analytics account. If you do not already have one, sign up for a Google Analytics account. You will need to set up a property (a website or app) and verify ownership with a tracking code before you can start collecting data. Google Analytics works by installing a JavaScript snippet in your online property to collect visitor information — but emails do not load JavaScript the way websites do. That is why email tracking requires the Measurement Protocol workaround described below.

Step 2: Generate your tracking URL. Build a custom URL using the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol. Google provides a guide on building custom tracking URLs. You will need to specify several parameters: your Google Analytics Tracking ID (tid, found under Property Settings), a customer ID (cid — set to 555 to keep it anonymous), the hit type, event category, event action, and the path and title of the tracked item. The resulting URL will be long, something like: https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=(youraccounttidhere)&cid=555&t=event&ec=emailtracking&ea=open&dp=%2Femail%2Fcampaign1&dt=Email%20Tracking.

Step 3: Wrap the URL in an HTML image tag. This is how you work around Google Analytics’s JavaScript limitation for email. Take your tracking URL and embed it as the source of an HTML image tag: <img src="yourURLhere">. Paste this into an HTML file along with some of your email text, and save the file. When a recipient’s email client loads the “image,” it actually fires a request to your tracking URL, which registers as an event in Google Analytics. This method is outlined by Google directly in their Measurement Protocol documentation.

Step 4: Send a test email. Open the HTML file in a browser, then copy and paste everything into an email draft. Note that browser-based email clients may produce formatting errors — desktop programs like Outlook or Apple Mail tend to work more reliably for this step. Send the test email to yourself or a coworker, then check Google Analytics to see if the open registers. If it does not, the issue could be with the tracking URL, the HTML formatting, or the email client. There are many moving parts, and multiple points of potential failure.

Step 5: Deploy your email campaign. Once your test confirms that opens are registering, replicate the setup in your actual campaign email. Open the Google Analytics real-time analytics page and watch as “active user” numbers begin to climb — each count indicates a recipient opening your email. Keep in mind that this is an imperfect system even for campaign tracking. It does not track many behavioral Gmail metrics, requires significant setup effort, and does not work reliably for Gmail recipients because Gmail caches images through its own proxy servers, which can prevent subsequent opens from registering.

What Are the Limitations of Tracking Emails with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics was built for website analytics, and its email tracking capabilities reflect that limitation. The pixel method described above only tracks whether a recipient opens an email — it does not track link clicks within the email body (though you can add UTM parameters to links separately), replies, attachment downloads, or any other behavioral interaction.

The setup process is technically complex with multiple failure points: tracking URL misconfiguration, HTML formatting issues, and email client compatibility problems can all prevent tracking from working. Even when everything is configured correctly, Gmail’s image caching behavior can suppress open tracking for a large portion of your recipients.

Most importantly, this method tells you nothing about email productivity. It cannot measure your team’s average email response time, track email volume by hour or day, identify your top senders and recipients, or visualize how your team’s email habits change over time. For campaign tracking specifically, dedicated email marketing tools include built-in tracking that is more reliable, easier to configure, and provides richer data than the Google Analytics pixel workaround.

What Email Metrics Can Google Analytics Track vs. What It Cannot?

Google Analytics can track two email-related data points. First, email opens — detected through the Measurement Protocol pixel method described above. Second, link clicks — tracked when you add UTM parameters to the URLs in your email content, which allows Google Analytics to attribute website visits back to a specific email campaign.

Google Analytics cannot track email response times, the number of emails sent or received per day, email thread length or depth, top senders and recipients, email volume by hour or day of the week, or any other operational email productivity metric. These metrics require a tool that integrates directly with your email account and analyzes your actual email activity rather than website traffic triggered by email links.

If your goal is to understand and improve how your team communicates via email — not just whether a marketing email was opened — you need a tool designed specifically for that purpose. A dedicated email analytics platform connects to your team’s email accounts, counts and visualizes sent and received emails, tracks email traffic patterns, calculates average response times, and presents the data in interactive reports that tell you exactly how your team is emailing.