It is easy to track a link in an email if you know the URL in advance. In many cases, however, links are dynamically populated into the content via placeholders at the point of launch. These dynamic links can still be tracked by Emarsys, but they are displayed differently in the reporting screens.
Below are some useful guidelines on how to prepare your link parameters so that you can be sure to have the most relevant reporting for every campaign type.
However you choose to configure your email reporting, please remember that you can always export all responses to any email via the End-user Guides:: Exporting contact responses page.
In general, we recommend you to be imaginative and experiment with how you insert, display and track your links. Test everything carefully, and if in doubt contact Emarsys Support. We'll be happy to advise you…
What kind of dynamic links are there?
Typical examples of dynamic links are:
- Links in email campaigns where the entire HTML content is added via the API.
- Links that are inserted into an email through API endpoints such as Creating a Tracked Link in an Email Campaign or Updating a Tracked Link in an Email Campaign.
- Links that are contained inside a JSON object.
- Predict recommendations.
Note: If the API is used to insert a link as the section link of a template, that link will not count as dynamic since all the section links for that section will be listed under the Link title that is defined in the section editor. Only if it is inserted directly into the body of the section will it count as dynamic.
What are the main differences in reporting?
For emails where all or part of the HTML content is inserted into placeholders, and for on-event emails, visual link tracking and social network reporting may not be available.
However, the main difference is that every single instance of every external event link is treated as a separate link by Emarsys. In highly personalized campaigns this may run to literally tens of thousands of links. The impact this has relates primarily to the link names that are used for reporting, seen here on the left:
Links which have a name defined are listed under their respective names. Links with no name defined are collectively listed in one entry under Unnamed dynamic links. Since the Emarsys reporting screens can only display a maximum of 100 named links, you need to consider how to apply the names (if you do have more than 100 named links, you can still Export them all in .csv format via the button in the upper right corner).
What are my options?
1. Don’t track some links
In certain cases, you may want to exclude some from the reporting. To do this, simply use the toggles at the Links tab.
Use case: In transactional emails such as a purchase confirmation, there may be many items listed and you might not be interested in who has clicked back to see what they just bought.
2. Don't differentiate between the tracked links
If you give none of the links a name, they will all be listed under one single entry: Unnamed dynamic links.
Use case: Transactional emails with a single personalized link in them, such as shipping confirmation, where you simply want to know the overall response rate.
3. Name all your links
To list a link in the reporting screens you need to add the following to the <a> tag:
e:sendingtime-tracking-name="my link name".
The final link should look like this:
<a e:sendingtime-tracking-name="my link name" href="http://example.com?q=link2">link text</a>
Use case: Only the first 100 links will be shown in the reporting screen, so this has limited use within Emarsys, but could be required if you want to export all the response and analyse them in detail outside Emarsys.
4. Name only some of your links
You can choose to add the name parameter to only a few links and leave the rest grouped together under Unnamed dynamic links.
Use case: When you want reporting on a limited number of static links, for example one of a number of targeted incentive pages for your different lifecycle segments.
5. Name your links by category
You could also use a placeholder in the name parameter which pulls a value from your database.
The final link could look something like this:
<a href="http://example.com/products?category={{rds.deals(contact.3).category}}">Use case: If you have a product catalog with 10,000 products, your reporting will be useless if you show each product individually. Instead you could group them by category.
6. Name your links by their location in the email
You can also give links a name according to where they appear in the email, e.g. ‘banner_image’, ‘main_image’, ‘CTA, ‘special_offer_1’, etc.
The final link could look something like this (here an image is linked):
<a href="http://example.com/something" e:sendingtime-tracking-name="banner_image"></a>
Use case: This is very useful for A/B testing different creatives such as images or calls to action. You can easily see if a CTA located at the top of the email is more effective than one located further down, for example.
General guidelines for naming links
There are a number of ways to add additional parameters for reporting, but the name must always be a string or a placeholder that converts into a string. Any field that can be converted could be used.