Linkstamp for newsletter writers
Which link in the issue did they click?
An issue goes out with five links in it. Your own reports can tell you how many people arrived, and nothing about which of the five brought them — unless each link says so for itself. Linkstamp tags them from the toolbar while you write, one click per link.
The problem: one issue, one number
A click from an e-mail usually arrives without a referrer. Mail apps and webmail do not pass one on, so the visit turns up as direct traffic, or under the name of a mail provider, next to everything else that arrived that way. Nothing in it says “newsletter”.
Your mailing tool's own click report fills part of that gap: it counts the clicks per link. What it cannot tell you is what happened next, because it stops at the click — and your site's reports, which do know what happened next, are the ones that cannot see the e-mail. The two halves of the question sit in two different tools.
UTM parameters join them. Put the issue in utm_campaign and the link's place in the issue in utm_content, and your own reports group the visits exactly the way you wrote the issue: the lead story, the second item, the line at the bottom. Then you can see which of them people actually came for, and write the next one accordingly.
How Linkstamp solves it, in three steps
Two values you set once, one you set per issue, and one per link.
Fix the two that never change
Your newsletter's own name goes in
utm_sourceand stays there for good;utm_mediumisemail. Save the pair as a preset in Linkstamp and mark it the default, and they are filled in every time you open it.One campaign per issue, one content per link
utm_campaignnames the issue — a date or a number, the same value on every link in it.utm_contentis the one that changes per link:lead-story,second-item,ps-link. That is the field your report will group by when you want to know which part of the issue did the work.Tag while you write
Open the page you are about to link to, click the Linkstamp icon — the address is already in the builder — type this issue's campaign and this link's content, and copy. Paste it into the draft and move on to the next one. The alternative is going back through a finished issue with a spreadsheet, which is the step that gets skipped on the day you are late.
What a tagged newsletter link looks like
The lead story in issue 42, and the link in the postscript of the same issue. Three tags identical, one different.
https://example.com/the-new-sizes?utm_source=the-weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=issue-42&utm_content=lead-storyhttps://example.com/the-new-sizes?utm_source=the-weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=issue-42&utm_content=ps-linkBoth point at the same page, and your report will show them as two rows: same campaign, different content. You can build one by hand right now with the free UTM builder on this site — it is the same link logic, in a web page. Linkstamp is the same thing without the pasting, and with the values you use every week already filled in.
Three things worth knowing
Keep the campaign value identical
issue-42on four links andIssue-42on the fifth is two issues in your report. The values are compared letter for letter, which is why a preset beats typing.Leave your own menu alone
In most analytics tools a tagged link starts a fresh visit, overwriting where the reader came from. Tag the links inside the issue, not the links between your own pages, or a click that began in your newsletter ends up filed under your own site.
A shortener does not help you
A shortened link passes the tags on to the page it lands on, so you still need them on the address underneath. What it does not do is tell you which link in the issue it was: that is what utm_content is for.
Selling something rather than writing about it? Linkstamp for online shop owners takes the same tags the other way round. And Linkstamp's own page lists everything it does, including the presets and the GA4 fields.
Tag the links in your next issue as you write it.
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