Clicks on Email Addresses That Analytics Never Sees

An enquiry route that looks unused

The contact page has a form and an email address. Analytics shows the form being sent a handful of times a month, and nothing at all for the address.

Meanwhile the inbox fills with messages from people who found the business on the website, and nobody connects the two.

The report suggests the website brings in very little. That conclusion is wrong, and it tends to be drawn at budget time.

The cause is simple. Clicking an email address hands the visitor to another program, and Analytics only sees what happens on your pages.

Why the click leaves no trace

An email address on a web page is usually a link starting with mailto. Clicking it asks the computer or phone to open its mail program with your address already filled in.

That means Outlook on an office computer, or the Mail app on an iPhone. The visitor writes, sends and carries on with their day.

Everything after the click happens outside the browser, so the tracking code records the page view and nothing more. In the reports, the person who wrote to you looks exactly like the person who gave up.

Who chooses the address over the form

Plenty of people would rather write their own email, and for sensible reasons.

• They want a copy in their sent folder, with the date on it.
• They need to attach a document, a photo or a plan.
• They copy a colleague or their boss on the request.
• They distrust forms after a message vanished into one.
• They are on a phone, where tapping the address is quickest.

The first matters most with business customers. Someone booking for a firm needs a record to point to later, and most forms leave them none.

Recording the click as an event

Analytics can record actions that are not page views. It calls them events, and each carries a category, an action and an optional label that you choose.

With Google Tag Manager, that means a trigger for clicks on links starting with mailto, and a tag sending an event: category Contact, action Email click, the page as the label.

Without Tag Manager, a developer can add a few lines to the email links in the templates that send the same event.

Then test it. Open the Real-Time report, click the address on your own site, and watch the event arrive within seconds. Do the same for phone numbers, since a tap on a number is just as invisible.

Turning the event into a goal

An event on its own sits in the Events reports, where few people look. A goal puts it beside your other conversions.

In the Admin section, create a goal of the Event type matching that category and action. Email clicks then appear in the Conversions reports and against each traffic source.

Goals count only from the day they are created, and earlier clicks cannot be recovered, so set this up now rather than at the next redesign.

Add an annotation on the start date. The contact page's bounce rate will fall that day, since visitors who click the address stop counting as bounces, and the note explains why.

A worked example

A court reporting firm with five reporters and an office near the courthouse takes bookings for examinations for discovery, and orders for transcripts, mostly from assistants at law firms.

Its booking page had a form and the office email address. Analytics showed the form sent a handful of times a month, and the owner had begun to wonder what the website was for.

The office manager saw it differently. Most bookings arrived by email, with the notice of examination attached and the lawyer copied, from assistants who had looked up the address on the site.

Assistants needed the attachment and a copy in their sent folder, so they clicked the address, and each visit ended without a trace.

The firm added an event for email clicks and made it a goal. Within a few weeks the booking page showed several email clicks for every form, most from visitors who had come through Google.

The form stayed, cut down to what a new client needs, and the address moved higher on the page.

Reading clicks beside form submissions

The useful figure is the total of forms, email clicks and phone taps, by month. It is the closest Analytics gets to the enquiries the site actually produces.

Then look at the split by page. Where people click the address rather than fill in the form, the readers are often regular customers, who know what they want and want it in writing.

Check the split by device. Visitors on phones often tap an address or a number rather than fill in a form with a thumb.

And check sources. A directory listing or a supplier's link that produces email clicks is doing more work than the form report ever suggested.

A click is not a sent email

The event records intent, not delivery. On a computer with no mail program set up, the click opens a setup screen or nothing at all, and the visitor copies the address instead.

Others never click. They select the address, paste it into the webmail they already have open, and stay invisible even with tracking in place.

So treat the count as a floor. The inbox is the other half of the record: once a month, count the messages that came through the website, and ask new customers where they found you.

The counter-case

A business that gets a few enquiries a year, mostly by phone, has less to learn here. The inbox already tells the whole story.

Nor will the count ever be complete. It shows direction and proportion, which is what a budget decision needs.

And a site with only a form has no gap to close, though it loses some of the people who prefer to write their own email.

For any site that shows an email address, though, tracking the click is the difference between a report that undercounts the website and one that roughly matches the inbox.

Tracking the clicks

1. Count last month's emails that came from the site.
2. Find every email link in the site's templates.
3. Add an event for clicks on mailto links.
4. Test it in the Real-Time report.
5. Create a goal from the event.
6. Annotate the start date in Analytics.
7. Compare email clicks with forms every month.

Step five is the one that changes decisions. An event nobody looks at changes nothing; a goal puts email enquiries in the reports everyone already reads.

Reading what visitors did around one page is also the approach in visitors who look at prices and leave.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.