You send a member renewal email out of Altru, renewals pick up that week, and someone asks whether the email worked. Google Analytics shows a bump in “direct” traffic and nothing else. The email did its job, but nothing in the link told Analytics where the visitor came from.
The fix is not complicated: tag every link in your emails with UTM parameters. Google Analytics 4 reads them automatically, with nothing to install. The rest of this article covers how to tag links consistently, where tracking usually breaks for Altru organizations, and how to check that it’s working.
What UTM parameters are and why GA needs them
Email clients don’t pass a referrer the way a website does. When someone clicks a link in Gmail or Outlook, GA4 often has no idea where they came from and files the visit under direct or unassigned. UTM parameters are tags you add to the end of a URL to tell Analytics where the visit came from:
- utm_source: where the email came from, such as
altruornewsletter - utm_medium: always
email. GA4’s default channel grouping looks for this exact value to put the visit in the Email channel. - utm_campaign: the specific send, such as
member-renewal-2026-11 - utm_content (optional): which link in the email was clicked, such as
header-buttonorfooter-link
A tagged link looks like this:
https://www.yourmuseum.org/membership?utm_source=altru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=member-renewal-2026-11
Adding the tags to your Altru emails
Wherever you can edit a link’s URL in an Altru email, whether that’s a marketing email, an acknowledgment, or an eTicket template, paste in the full tagged URL instead of the plain one. If a particular template doesn’t let you change a link, test it in a sandbox or ask Blackbaud support before assuming it can be tagged. Two things to check before you rely on this:
- Does click tracking rewrite your links? Many email tools wrap links in a redirect to count clicks. That’s usually fine, since the redirect sends people on to your original URL with the UTM tags intact. But confirm it by sending a test to yourself, clicking the link, and checking the address bar on the page you land on. If the tags are gone, something in the chain is dropping them.
- Is there a built-in option to append tracking automatically? We’re not certain this is available in every Altru setup. Check your email settings, or ask Blackbaud support. If it isn’t, tag links by hand. Google’s free Campaign URL Builder makes that quick.
If a URL already has a question mark in it (for example, a link to a specific event or program), add the UTM tags with & rather than a second ?. A second question mark is a common way to break the link without noticing.
Where tracking breaks: the purchase step
Tagging links tells GA4 that someone arrived from the email. It doesn’t tell you whether they bought a membership or ticket, because that happens wherever your checkout lives.
If your email links to a page on your own site, and the visitor then moves to an Altru-hosted web form on a different domain, GA4 can lose the thread. Whether you can carry the session across depends on whether your GA4 tag runs on the checkout pages, and on whether cross-domain measurement is set up between the two domains. Neither is guaranteed with hosted web forms. Find out what you can add to your forms before you promise anyone revenue-by-email numbers.
In practice, many teams report on two things separately:
- In GA4: sessions and engagement by campaign, which shows whether the email drove visits.
- In Altru: revenue or memberships in the days after the send, pulled with a query and compared against a normal week. You can also use a dedicated source code or appeal on the transaction if your process supports it.
Keep the naming consistent
UTM values are case-sensitive, so Email and email show up as two separate rows. Before your next send, write a short naming sheet and share it with everyone who builds emails:
- All lowercase, hyphens instead of spaces
utm_medium=email, every time- Campaign names that start with the program, followed by the date:
membership-renewal-2026-11,gala-invite-2026-10 - Don’t tag links between pages on your own website. Internal UTMs can overwrite the real source in your reports and make email look weaker than it was.
Checking that it works
Send a test email to yourself, click a tagged link, then open GA4’s Realtime report. Your visit should appear with the source and campaign you set. A day or so after the real send, look at the Traffic acquisition report with “Session campaign” as the dimension. If the email shows up as Email and not Direct or Unassigned, the tags are doing their job.
One limit to know: GA4 measures clicks that reach your website. It doesn’t measure email opens. Open rates come from your email tool, and they’ve become less reliable since some mail apps started preloading images for privacy. For decisions, clicks and the Altru revenue that follows are the better numbers.
Using Social Good’s Email Designer
If you send eTickets, acknowledgments, or renewal reminders with Email Designer, those emails are branded and sent automatically from Altru queries. Because the same templates go out on every send, adding tagged links to them once keeps your GA4 campaign names consistent without anyone re-tagging links by hand.
