"mailto:"-link conversion tracking with Google Analytics via an e-mail forwarding service

Question

I would like to make a test scenario with Google Analytics and "mailto:"-Conversion Tracking or better explained, I want to track how many inquiries have i really received via a website.

The common way of tracking clicks on a "mailto:"-Link is to use "onmousedown" or "onclick" functions.

e.g. [email protected] [email protected]

The fear that I have is, that more and more crawlers, scripts, spambots,... will execute the onclick / onmousedown commands. Additionally not every visitor who is clicking on an e-mail address is also sending us an e-mail. After the "new message" windows is opened, our tracking usually stops. What I want to verify is, how many users are really sending us an e-mail instead of tracking how many people click on an e-mail address.

The solution that I have in mind, without too much technical / development background is an "e-mail forwarding solution".

1. [email protected] is shown at the website domain1.com as inquiry e-mail address.
2. [email protected] is automatically forwarding all e-mails to [email protected]
3. [email protected] is executing a Google Analytics event (which is quite simple) and is again forwarding all e-mails to the real email address, we want to have the emails sent to (e.g.: [email protected])

Questions

• Is the "forwarding idea" a good one or are there any downsides?
• How would you solve that idea / issue?
• Is there any open-source solution available for the forwarding part (as the Google Analytics part is not that hard to develop)?
• Which email engine/framework and/or which programming language would you recommend to use here?

Answer 1

The problem with mailto: links from a tracking point of view is that they open in a separate program, so you cannot add tracking to the 'send ecent'.

Rather than having mailto: links, you could instead have an email contact form. Add a Google Analytics tracking on the form submit event.

Answer 2

I don't think that would be possible and even if it were you would not be able to see the funnel which is important to see an analyzing conversions.

You are best having a form and thank you page to be 100% accurate.

Answer 3

The problem with tracking a mailto link is that it doesn't ping a server, but the default or open email client on the operating system. Due to the email client like Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail not wanting to share this information it's difficult to capture it. I wrote an article showing a few workarounds with how to track mailto links.

You can also use Google Tag manager. Here's a video on it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5XDcH1tNm0