Click Tracking

What is Link Tracking?

Like Open Tracking, Click Tracking is a method of collecting valuable information about how your recipients interact with the emails you send. Click Tracking is limited to HTML content, and does not rely on the user allowing images in their email client. Any tracked link that the user clicks on will record statistics. Click Tracking can also provide helpful diagnostics, such as determining if a particular recipient has clicked a link that was emailed to them.

How does it work?

When Click Tracking has been enabled, links in your messages will be replaced with new links that route through your SMTPD sending profile link_domain. When an email recipient clicks on a tracked link, the URL is opened in their default browser. The browser will request the URL from the SMTPD platform, at which point we record information about the user's location & what device / browser they are using. While we record this information, we simultaneously redirect the user to the original URL in your email. The branded URL the user will see is based on your sending profile link_domain.

Links tracked by SMTPD do not expire. Since services like Gmail retain emails for years, it's possible that your recipients may search for and follow links for a long time into the future. Each tracked link issued by SMTPD contains all the necessary information to redirect to the original URL, even if you delete your SMTPD sending profile, so the link you send to your recipients will continue to work for the foreseeable future. Our redirection infrastructure is also globally distributed and redundant, and we built it with the goal of making sure the link redirection is as transparent and fast as possible for your recipients.

Link Security

All links tracked by the SMTPD platform are routed through our servers using HTTPS/TLS. Unlike other link tracking services that use non-encrypted HTTP connections, we ensure that eavesdroppers cannot capture the links sent to your recipients due to the redirection link using a non-encrypted HTTP URL. Transactional emails tend to contain recipient-specific links, so having "full-time" HTTPS for Tracked Links is an important protection that we believe is essential for your most important emails.

Requirements

Account Approval & Sending Profile verification

One of the pre-requisites for using our link tracking system is that you have created an account and gone through our normal account approval process & correctly setup a sending profile - all emails used branded urls which are defined in a sending profile link_domain. Until your account is approved & a sending profile has been validated no emails will be accepted for sending OR encoded/tracked when sending emails.

Proper encoding

Links must be properly encoded for both text and HTML. Including the following requirements:

• Links must be well-formed, according to RFC-3986.

• Links in HTML a elements must be HTML-encoded. We automatically HTML-decode the URLs when processing your HTMLBody.

• Links must be properly URL-encoded.

• Links must include a http or https protocol to be properly tracked.

Please note that if a link that is in an email message is malformed or improperly URL-encoded, we will skip replacing it with a tracked link. This ensures that only links that can be redirected using http-level redirects will be issued by SMTPD.

Only HTTP and HTTPS are supported

There are many protocols that can be used with links (i.e. ftp://,ssh://,mailto:, etc.). Currently only http and https links will be encoded and tracked by the SMTPD platform.

Enabling Link Tracking

Click Tracking Options

There are several variations of Click Tracking available, depending on your requirements, you can choose from the following options:

• none - No links will be replaced or tracked. This is the default setting for all messages.

• click_tracking - Links will be replaced in the send content_html field. You can set the click_tracking property on each message you send through the API.

Per-link opt-out

In some cases you may wish to exclude a link from tracking, even if the rest of the message's links should be tracked. To do this, you should add an additional data-smtpd-no-track attribute to your links in the content_html of your message. For example:

<a data-smtpd-no-track href="http://example.com"> Non-Tracked Link </a>

Note that this feature requires that the link be contained and ignored in HTML.