Click tracking

Every link in an issue is rewritten to run through a tracking address before the issue goes out, so that a click can be counted and the reader still lands on the page you linked to. There is nothing to switch on: click tracking works from your first send on our shared address, and moves onto your own domain when you add one.

Which links are rewritten

Every link in the finished issue is rewritten: your curated picks, and also the links in your introduction, your commentary and your own footer text. The plain text version of the issue is rewritten too, where a bare URL is matched up to the first space and a trailing full stop or comma is left outside the link where it belongs.

Click tracking has no off switch. Open tracking has one, because a reader can decline to click but cannot decline a pixel, and the two are counted quite differently for that reason.

The address your links run on

Links run on go.yourdomain.com once that record verifies, and on t.issuemint.com until then. Nothing breaks in the meantime and no issue needs re-sending: the switch happens on its own the moment the record checks out.

The tracking record verifies independently of the website records, so a working site with go. still propagating means links stay on our host a little longer. The full record set explains how the others relate. Worth knowing before you remove a domain: tracking moves back to our host, and the go.yourdomain.com links in issues you have already sent stop working.

The tags added automatically

Issue Mint adds three campaign parameters to every destination: utm_source is your newsletter’s slug, the short name in its web address, utm_medium is email, and utm_campaign is issue- followed by the issue number.

That sounds like housekeeping and it is worth more than it looks. Any site you link to that looks at its own visitor statistics can see the traffic came from your newsletter, and which issue sent it. It is exactly the evidence a sponsor wants at renewal time, and it makes the sites you feature considerably more willing to work with you later. What link tracking gives you makes that case at more length.

Tags already on a destination are kept

A parameter already on the link wins. If a sponsor hands you a URL carrying its own utm_campaign, that value is left exactly as it is and only the missing parameters are added, so their reporting keeps working and the renewal conversation does not start with an argument.

The rest of the query string is passed through character for character rather than taken apart and rebuilt. That matters more than it sounds: rebuilding a query string quietly drops repeated parameters, renames dotted ones such as mkt.tok, and mangles bracketed filters, all of which can send a reader to a different page from the one you linked to.

Clicks from your archive count too

Archive pages carry the same tracked links, without anything identifying a reader, so somebody who finds issue twelve through a search engine six months from now counts towards that link as well. Your archive keeps working long after the send, and this is where you see it.

Because there is no reader attached, an archive click adds to the total clicks on the issue report and never to the unique clickers, and it is left out of the daily click figures behind the dashboard, which count people rather than hits. An issue sent before click tracking existed keeps its direct links, and its archive page is not rewritten after the fact.

What the reader experiences

A reader who clicks is sent on to the destination immediately, with nothing to look at in between. The redirect is a temporary one, deliberately, because a browser caches a permanent redirect and every click after the first would stop reaching us.

If anything goes wrong while the click is being recorded, the reader still goes through. Your link working matters more than the count. A code that has been truncated or mistyped, which happens to old issues in forwarded emails, gets a short page saying so rather than an error.

Which links are never tracked

Five kinds of link stay direct: the unsubscribe link, the open pixel, the view in browser link, the “Powered by Issue Mint” credit, and any link to your own newsletter website.

The unsubscribe link has to stay direct because one-click unsubscribe is a standard mailbox providers act on, and routing it through a redirect would break it. Your own hosts are excluded so that a link to your own archive is not counted as a reader following somebody else’s website, and both your free address and your custom domain count as yours. Anything that is not an ordinary web link is left alone as well: an email address, a phone number or a jump to a heading has nothing to track.