Tracking email link clicks (commonly referred to as mailto: link clicks) on your website is a simple but powerful way to gain insight into user behavior. For marketers, it’s a key metric—shedding light on how visitors engage with your content and helping connect marketing efforts to real outcomes. Traditional click tracking tells you how often your email link is clicked and where those clicks come from. But there’s a catch: click data alone offers an incomplete picture. It stops at the click, leaving you blind to what happens next—whether a message was actually sent, or whether that interaction led to a conversion. In this guide, we’ll walk you through both the standard approach to tracking email clicks and introduce a new method that connects the dots all the way from click to sale.
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Tracking Email Clicks Using Google Tag Manager
Tracking email clicks, or mailto links is a simple process in Google Tag Manager. It requires a catch all trigger and a little know how. Assuming you have a Google Tag Manager container to work within let’s get started:
1. Create a new trigger
2. Choose the Just Links trigger configuration
3. Choose “some link clicks”
We don’t want to track all link clicks, just some. Choose some link clicks and then add the “Click URL” variable. This likely is not a variable that is available out of the box, so make sure to click “choose built-in variable” and find the “click URL” option
4. Configure the click URL targeting
To use a catch all for all email links on your website, use a contains statement and make the value “mailto”
This will ensure all emails on your site are tracked. However if you want to track an individual email address then you will simply add a colon and your desired email address to this trigger like so:
5. Save your trigger
Once this is complete, just name and save your trigger. This trigger can now be used for GA4 or Google Ads tags in your container.
Tracking Mailto Link Clicks In GA4
After creating your email click trigger, you can now send these signals to GA4 or any other marketing platform such as Google Ads, Meta, Linkedin etc…
Tracking email clicks in GA4 is simple after you have created your trigger.
1. Create a new tag
Open your Tag Manager dashboard, and click “new tag”
2. Choose the GA4 Tag
Choose the GA4 tag in Tag Manager. Then add your measurement ID and an event name. We typically use the name “email_click” for easy identification.
3. Choose Your Trigger
Finally, choose the trigger we created above. Save the tag and publish your container.
4. Don’t Forget To Test!
Make sure to click preview in the Tag Manager dashboard and test the button click!
A Full Funnel Approach To Email Click Conversions
You may have noticed that the method above tracks conversions based solely on clicks. It doesn’t account for whether that click led to an email being sent—or if that email resulted in an actual conversion. This has been a long-standing challenge for marketers since the early days of the internet.
While many would recommend eliminating email altogether in favor of a contact form, we know that’s not always feasible. That’s why we built Email Click Insights—the first tool designed to give you full visibility into what happens after someone clicks an email link on your site.
With Email Click Insights, you can finally connect email interactions to traffic sources, understand the full customer journey, and close the last gap in your attribution funnel.
Sign up for a free trial and see the difference for yourself.
