How Can I Track Link Placement in My Messages?

Home > Support > Knowledge Base Home > Customers > Messages > Tracking

Search the Knowledge Base:

Browse by Category

How Can I Track Link Placement in My Messages?

By turning on click tracking for your messages, our system will track and report how many times each address in your message was visited by your subscribers.

But what if you to track how many times the same address was clicked on in different locations in your messages?

Why Track the Same Link?

To illustrate by example, imagine you have a message with a link to your website at the top, middle, and bottom sections of the body. (See graphic on right).

You want to see where subscribers are clicking on that same link for either of these reasons:

To determine how far down subscribers are reading
To see which copy is most effective in driving traffic to your site

But if you turn on click tracking for the message, our system will aggregate the numbers and report the total number of times that address was visited from the three links. It won't segment them based on the location in the message.

How to Track the Same Address

In order to generate a report with the three locations separated, you can use "tags" to make the links slightly different without affecting their functionality.

Using our example, if our website's address were http://www.example.com and each of our links pointed to that same address, we could change them to:

Link	Modified Address
Top	http://www.example.com/#message_top
Middle	http://www.example.com/#message_middle
Bottom	http://www.example.com/#message_bottom

For your messages, all you need to do is add a # symbol and some kind of code you can identify on your reports page later.

Then, in your reports, you'll find a separate statistic for each of those links pointing to the same page.

For our example, our statistics would look like this:

Plain Text vs. HTML

Finally, if you're including both a plain-text and HTML version of your message, you can use separate codes for each to see which version subscribers are clicking through from.

Instead of #message_ as the beginning of our tag, we might put #text
and #html instead. So, #message_top would become #text_top and #html_top for your plain text and HTML versions, respectively.