What is Email Traffic in Google Analytics?

You send a great email newsletter, see a jump in your website visitors, and feel confident your marketing is working. But when you look in Google Analytics, that traffic is mysteriously labeled as "Direct" - as if those users typed your URL directly into their browser. This guide will walk you through what email traffic is in Google Analytics, why it’s often misreported, and exactly how to fix it so you can properly measure the success of your email marketing.

How Google Analytics Tries to Identify Email Traffic

In Google Analytics 4, every visitor is categorized by their origin using dimensions like Source, Medium, and Default Channel Group. The "Default Channel Group" is GA's attempt to sort your traffic into neat, high-level buckets like Organic Search, Paid search, Social, and of course, Email.

For a visit to land in the "Email" channel, GA needs a clue that the click came from an email client. Often, larger Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Mailchimp or Klaviyo automatically add tracking parameters to the links in your emails. When a user clicks a link that contains these specific tags, Google Analytics recognizes them and correctly attributes the session to the Email channel.

But this process is far from foolproof. Google Analytics can't actually see inside a user's inbox. It relies entirely on the data that gets passed along when someone clicks a link, and in many situations, that data is incomplete or gets stripped away.

Why Is My Email Traffic Showing Up as (direct) / (none)?

The most common problem with email tracking is seeing it miscategorized as Direct traffic, which is represented as (direct) / (none) in your reports. This happens when a user clicks a link from your email, but no referring source information is passed to Google Analytics.

Consider these common scenarios where this happens:

Desktop Email Clients: When a user opens an email in a desktop application like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail and clicks a link, the app opens the web page directly in their default browser. In this process, the referral information that says "this user came from an email" is often lost, confusing GA.
Secure Links: Clicks coming from a secure https:// site to a non-secure http:// site sometimes lose their referrer data.
Private Browsing or Privacy Tools: Users clicking links in private or incognito mode, or with certain privacy browser extensions, may intentionally block referral data from being passed.
Mobile Apps: Clicks from within certain mobile app email clients can also fail to pass the necessary referral information.

When Google Analytics can't figure out where a user came from, it categorizes the session as "Direct." This is a significant problem. If half your email traffic is being mislabeled, you have no real way of measuring its ROI. You can't tell which campaigns are driving sales or engagement, which might lead you to make bad decisions, like cutting the budget for what you mistakenly believe is an underperforming channel.

Fortunately, there's a straightforward and universally accepted way to take control of this process and tell Google Analytics exactly how to categorize your traffic.

The Essential Fix: Tracking Your Campaigns with UTM Parameters

If you remember one thing from this article, let it be this: you need to be using UTM parameters for all links in your marketing emails.

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are simple tags you add to the end of your URLs. They don't change the destination page, but they feed specific tracking information directly into Google Analytics, overriding GA's guesswork and giving you clean, accurate data.

What Are the Key UTM Parameters?

There are five standard UTM parameters, but for email, three are absolutely essential:

utm_source: This identifies the specific source of your traffic. Think of it as answering "who" is sending the visitor. For emails, you might use your brand name, the name of your newsletter, or your email platform, like klaviyo or november_newsletter.
utm_medium: This identifies the marketing channel. For all email traffic, this tag must be set to email to appear correctly in the "Email" default channel group. This is the most critical tag for solving the Direct traffic problem.
utm_campaign: This identifies the specific promotion or campaign. This is how you differentiate between different email sends, like black_friday_2024 or new_product_launch.

There are also two more for even more specific tracking:

utm_content: Use this to differentiate links within the same email. For example, if you're A/B testing a hero main text link versus a button at the bottom, you could use utm_content=hero_link and utm_content=footer_button.
utm_term: This is less common for email and is typically reserved for tracking paid keywords in PPC campaigns.

How to Build UTM-Tracked URLs

Manually typing out these long URLs can be tedious and prone to error. The easiest way to create them is by using Google’s free GA4 Campaign URL Builder.

Here’s how you’d use it, step-by-step:

Enter the destination URL you want to send people to (e.g., your homepage or a specific product page).
Leave campaign_id blank (it's for Google Ads).
Fill in your chosen names for utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign.

For example, let's say you're promoting a new collection in your fall newsletter. Your setup might look like this:

Website URL: https://www.yourshop.com/new-arrivals
Campaign Source: fall_newsletter
Campaign Medium: email
Campaign Name: q4_new_collection

The tool will automatically generate your fully-tagged URL:

https://www.yourshop.com/new-arrivals?utm_source=fall_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=q4_new_collection

Now, you simply use this new, longer URL in your email campaign. When a user clicks it, Google Analytics will know precisely that the visit came from your Fall Newsletter email promoting your new collection. No more guesswork, no more "Direct" traffic.

Important UTM Best Practices

To keep your data clean and easy to read, follow these simple rules:

Always use lowercase. UTM parameters are case-sensitive. Email and email will show up as two separate mediums in your reports, which creates a mess. Stick to lowercase for everything.
Use dashes or underscores instead of spaces. Spaces in URLs can cause strange formatting issues. Use black_friday or black-friday, not black friday.
Be consistent with your naming. If you call your newsletter source weekly_newsletter one week and Newsletter_Weekly the next, you’ll have a hard time analyzing its performance over time. It's often helpful to create a simple spreadsheet to document your naming conventions to share with your team.

How to Find And Analyze Email Traffic in GA4

Once you've started using UTM parameters, you can easily find your email performance data inside Google Analytics 4.

Using the Traffic Acquisition Report

The quickest way to see an overview of your channel performance is through the default traffic reports.

Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
By default, the report shows data by Session default channel group. Here, you will see a clear row for "Email." This row aggregates all traffic where the session medium was tagged as email.
To see the results of your individual campaigns, click the small blue "+"-sign icon next to the primary dimension title to add a secondary dimension. Search for and select "Session campaign."

This view will show you each of your individual email campaigns (as defined by your utm_campaign tag) and allow you to see their respective sessions, engaged users, conversions, and revenue.

Building a Custom Exploration Report

For a more detailed and flexible view, you can build a more advanced report in the "Explore" tab.

Go to the Explore section and start a new "Free form" exploration.
In the "Dimensions" panel, import Session campaign, Session source, and Session medium.
In the "Metrics" panel, import key performance indicators like Sessions, Engaged sessions, Conversions, Total revenue, and Session conversion rate.
Drag Session campaign to the "Rows" field.
Drag your chosen metrics to the "Values" field.
To view only email traffic, create a Filter at the bottom where Session Medium exactly matches email.

This creates a clean, customized report that shows you just your email campaigns and their most important performance metrics, which you can save and revisit at any time.

Final Thoughts

Accurately tracking email traffic isn't an automatic process in Google Analytics, but it's essential for any business serious about measuring marketing ROI. By consistently using UTM parameters on every link, you move from guessing games to data-driven facts, clarifying exactly what impact your email marketing is having on your bottom line.

While isolating your analysis to Google Analytics is a massive step forward, jumping between GA, your email platform, your ad accounts, and your e-commerce store to get a complete picture can still be a huge time-sink. We built Graphed to solve this by consolidating all your data in one place. You simply connect all your accounts - like Google Analytics, Shopify, Klaviyo, and Facebook Ads - and can then build dashboards using plain English questions like, "Show me a chart of total revenue from my Q4 email campaigns vs my Facebook ads," and Graphed creates the report for you instantly, keeping the data live and up-to-date.