About link tracking

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With link tracking, you can see if contacts clicked any links in your campaigns. This helps you gauge the effectiveness of your emails and measure contact engagement. 

How link tracking works

By default, link tracking is enabled for all direct and automated campaigns that include links. 

We add a unique tracking link to every link you include in your campaign. The tracking link is specific to the campaign you send and each contact who receives it.

When a contact clicks a link in your campaign, they are directed to the URL you specified. We then use a tracking link to log that link click action in our system. This link click action is reflected in your campaign reports and each contact's record, under the recent activity stream.

Note that we cannot track a link click action that uses an email address or a personalization tag in place of a URL.

With link tracking, you can see the following data in your campaign reports:

  • Which links are being clicked
  • The number of times those links are clicked
  • Which contacts clicked links

In addition to tracking engagement with your emails, you can use link tracking to trigger link actions and automations, create segments, add conditional content to your campaigns, update a lead score, and more.

Link tracking and Site Tracking

If you're using the Site Tracking feature, we'll add a parameter to each link in your email that directs contacts to a page on your site with Site Tracking installed. We add some information to the link in a way that lets us identify the contact who clicked your campaign link and visited your web page. This additional link information should not be visible to the end user.

We add this information to these URLs because it lets us send the contact's information to your webpage so we can track and log their page visit. It also keeps us compliant with major web browsers on how we collect data on contacts and their page visit activity.

If you wish to remove this parameter, you can take one of two actions:

Option 1: Manually turn off link tracking for each email you create
This is done on the Campaign Summary page for each campaign under "Options." When link tracking is turned off, we will not be able to track any link click engagement with your emails.

Option 2: Untick the "Site Tracking" box for the whitelisted URL.

This will turn off site tracking for that URL. This is done on the Settings>Tracking page in your account.

How link tracking works with custom domain names (CNAMEs)

If you use a custom domain name (CNAME) and have link tracking enabled, we’ll still redirect contacts to one of our link tracking domains to track that link click. These domains will be masked with your CNAME.

View link click data

Link click data is located on the reports page for each direct and automated campaign you send.

Locate link click data for direct campaigns

  1. Click Reports on the left menu.
  2. Click the "All Campaigns" option on the left side of your screen.
  3. Click the campaign name.
  4. Click the "Clicks" option located in the "Summary" box.

Locate link click data for automated campaigns

  1. Click Reports on the left menu.
  2. Click the "Automation Reports" option on the left side of your screen.
  3. Click "All Automations."
  4. Locate the automation for which you want to view link click data. Then click the ellipsis that appears under the automation name.
  5. A modal window will appear. Click the "Automation Overview" option.
  6. Scroll down the report until you see the Campaign Metrics table. Click the ellipsis under the campaign's name, then click the "Campaign Overview" option.
  7. Click the "Clicks" option located in the "Summary" box.

Information in the Clicks report

The Clicks report contains the following data:

  • Clicks
    Number of unique contacts that clicked on any link in a campaign. This metric includes only one click per contact.
  • Total link clicks
    Total number of times each link was clicked. This metric includes duplicate link clicks for each contact.
  • Unique link clicks
    Total unique clicks per link. This metric will not count duplicate link clicks per contact.
  • Did Not Click Any Links
    Number of contacts that did not click on any link.
  • Avg. Recipients Per Link Click
    Percentage shows the average link clicks per contact. It is calculated from the total number of link clicks divided by the number of contacts that clicked at least one link.

Also, we'll show you how each link performed in your email. You can click any link in the report to view a list of contacts who clicked that link.

  URL tracking is based on unique URLs being used and not hyperlinked text. To see the performance of each link, ensure that the URLs differ by at least one parameter so they can be tracked separately.

Link tracking and plain text campaigns

While it is possible to track link clicks in plain text campaigns, it is not advised for the following reasons:

  • It is not possible to embed your URL into text
  • Not all email clients or devices will hyperlink your URL when the email is received by your contact, making the link "not clickable." This can result in your contact copying and pasting your URL into a browser, which will not be tracked as a link click

If you wish to send a text-only email to contacts and track link clicks and opens, you can do so by creating an email that uses any template available in the template library and deleting all image blocks.

If a contact has images disabled, will their link click be tracked?

Yes, we will still track that link click. In addition, that link click will also be counted as a campaign open.

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