How to Track Mailchimp in Google Analytics

Tired of just knowing your email open and click rates? If you want to see what your subscribers actually do after they land on your site, you need to connect Mailchimp to Google Analytics. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up this tracking so you can measure the true performance and ROI of your email campaigns.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Why Bother Tracking Mailchimp in Google Analytics?

Your Mailchimp report tells you part of the story: who opened your email and who clicked a link. That’s valuable, but it’s incomplete. The real action happens after the click. Answering critical business questions requires data from Google Analytics:

• Which individual campaigns drive the most sales or sign-ups? You can see if your "Summer Sale" email generated more revenue than your "New Arrivals" announcement.
• What is the lifetime value of an email subscriber vs. someone who comes from a Facebook Ad? Comparing channel performance helps you allocate your budget more effectively.
• What content do subscribers from specific email campaigns engage with most? You can find out if people who click your welcome series end up reading your blog, versus people from a flash sale who go straight to product pages.
• How does email marketing contribute to your overall marketing goals? See the complete picture of how email fits into your customer journey alongside channels like organic search, paid ads, and social media.

Without this connection, your email marketing exists in a data silo. By linking Mailchimp to Google Analytics, you move from measuring clicks to measuring impact.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

The Magic Ingredient: UTM Parameters

So, how does Google Analytics know that a visitor arrived from your Mailchimp newsletter? The answer is UTM parameters.

UTM parameters, short for "Urchin Tracking Module" parameters, are simple tags you add to the end of your URLs. These tags don't change the destination of the link, but they give Google Analytics precise information about where the click came from. It's like putting a little tracking label on every visitor who clicks a link in your email.

There are five standard UTM parameters, but for Mailchimp tracking, you’ll primarily care about these three:

• utm_source: Identifies the source of your traffic. For our purposes, this will be "mailchimp" or something similar that clearly signifies your email platform.
• **utm_medium****: Identifies the marketing medium. This will almost always be "email."
• **utm_campaign****: Identifies the specific campaign, like "welcome_series_email_1" or "q4_holiday_promo". This is the most important tag for tracking individual email performance.

When combined, they create a trackable URL that looks something like this:

https://www.yourstore.com/new-arrivals?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=october_newsletter

When someone clicks this link, Google Analytics reads these tags and correctly attributes their entire session - including all the pages they visit, actions they take, and purchases they make - to your "October Newsletter" email campaign from Mailchimp.

Fortunately, you don't have to build these long links by hand for every email. Mailchimp gives you two easy ways to set this up.

Option 1: The Automatic Way (Activate Mailchimp's Built-in Google Analytics Tracking)

The simplest method is to use Mailchimp’s native integration with Google Analytics. This feature automatically appends a set of standard UTM parameters to all the links in your email campaigns. For most users, this is the best place to start.

How to Set It Up

1. Log into your Mailchimp account.
2. Navigate to the email campaign you want to build or edit.
3. Scroll down to the Settings & Tracking section at the very bottom of the campaign builder checklist. Click "Edit."
4. Look for the heading "Google Analytics link tracking" and check the box next to it.
5. Mailchimp will ask you to provide a title for the UTM campaign value. By default, it will use your internal Mailchimp campaign name (e.g., "Email Campaign: Oct 23"), which is usually what you want. You can customize this if you need to.
6. Click "Save."

That's it! When you send this campaign, Mailchimp will automatically add the following tags to every link:

• utm_medium will be set to email.
• utm_source will be set to mailchimp.
• utm_campaign will be set to the campaign title you just specified.

Pros: It’s incredibly easy, fast, and eliminates human error. You set it once per campaign and forget it. Cons: It offers less flexibility. It applies the same campaign tag to every link in the email, so you can't differentiate between a click on a header button versus a click on a product image within the same email.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Option 2: The Manual Way (Build Custom UTM URLs for Maximum Control)

Sometimes you need more granular control over your tracking. For instance, what if you want to track which call-to-action in your newsletter performs best? Or, what if your company uses a specific naming convention for all marketing campaigns that doesn’t align with Mailchimp's default?

In these cases, you’ll want to build your UTM-tagged URLs manually.

How to Manually Add UTM Links

You don't need to craft these by hand. Google provides a free and easy-to-use tool: the GA4 Campaign URL Builder.

1. Open the URL builder and fill in the fields:
2. As you type, the tool will generate the full campaign URL at the bottom of the page.
3. Copy the newly generated URL.
4. In the Mailchimp email editor, select the text, button, or image you want to link. Instead of using your regular URL, paste the full UTM-tagged URL you just copied.

Important: If you use manual UTM parameters, make sure you uncheck Mailchimp’s automatic "Google Analytics link tracking" feature for that campaign. Otherwise, you'll end up with double-tagged links, which can mess up your data.

Finding Your Mailchimp Data in Google Analytics 4

Once you’ve sent a campaign with UTM tracking enabled, how do you see the results in Google Analytics 4? Here's where to look.

Log into your GA4 property and navigate to the reports section.

1. Check the Traffic Acquisition Report

This is the best place for a high-level overview.

• On the left-hand menu, go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
• By default, this report is grouped by Session default channel group. You will see traffic aggregated under the "Email" channel here. This confirms that GA4 is receiving your email traffic.
• For more detail, click the dropdown for the primary dimension and change it to Session source / medium. You should now see a row for mailchimp / email.
• To see individual campaign performance, change the primary dimension to Session campaign. You'll now see a list of the campaign names you set via UTMs, allowing you to directly compare metrics like Sessions, Engaged sessions, Conversions, and Total revenue for each email you've sent.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

2. Create a Custom "Email Performance" Exploration Report

For a dedicated and reusable report, GA4’s Explore tool is perfect. This allows you to build a custom table that focuses specifically on the metrics that matter most for your email marketing.

1. In the left-hand menu, click on Explore and select "Blank exploration."
2. In the Variables column on the left, you need to import the dimensions and metrics you want to use.
3. Build the Report Tab:
4. Filter for Email Only:

You now have a clean, dedicated report that shows the performance of every Mailchimp campaign. You can see precisely how much traffic, how many conversions, and how much revenue each specific newsletter or promotional email generated. You can name this exploration "Mailchimp Performance Report" and come back to it any time.

Final Thoughts

Connecting your Mailchimp campaigns to Google Analytics using UTM parameters transforms your reporting from basic to brilliant. It empowers you to move beyond simple vanity metrics and see the direct impact your email marketing has on website engagement, sales, and your company's bottom line.

Once you’ve mastered connecting individual platforms, you’ll realize that your full customer journey is still scattered across a dozen tools - Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, your CRM, and more. Bringing all that data together is another manual challenge. At Graphed, we automate that entire process. You can connect all your marketing and sales data in seconds and use simple, natural language to ask questions and build dashboards. Instead of hunting through reports, you can just ask, "Show me my sales generated from my October newsletter compared to my fall Facebook campaign," and get an instant answer.