Find out which of your links actually landed

Tracked under your name, not ours

Once your domain is set up, every link in your issue points at your own address rather than some tracking service the reader has never heard of. That is partly about looking like yourself, and partly practical: people hover over links before they click, and an address they recognise gets clicked more than one they do not.

Before your domain is ready, links run through ours so nothing is broken while you get set up, and they switch over on their own once it is.

The tags that tell people you sent them

Every link gets tagged automatically with where it came from and which issue it was in. If the site you linked to looks at their own numbers, they can see that the visitors came from your newsletter, and which issue sent them.

That sounds like housekeeping and it is worth more than it looks. It is exactly the evidence a sponsor asks for, and it means the sites you feature can see you sending them readers, which makes people considerably more willing to work with you later. Any tags already on the destination are left alone rather than overwritten.

The numbers have the robots taken out

Company email systems open links before a human sees them. If your reader works somewhere with an IT department, something has very likely clicked every link in your issue within seconds of it arriving, purely to check none of them are dangerous. Left in, those visits would make your numbers fiction, and they are the reason a lot of newsletter reporting flatters everybody.

We recognise the well-known scanners, and we catch the other tell too: one reader appearing to click six different links two seconds after delivery is not reading, it is being scanned. Those are recorded but kept out of every figure we show you. Open tracking is there if you want it, with a switch to turn it off, and the report says plainly that Apple inflates the number.

The report you will actually read

After each issue: how many went out, how many arrived, how many opened, how many clicked, how many unsubscribed off the back of it, and a table of every link ranked by readers who clicked with the share of your audience each one pulled. Clicks over the first forty-eight hours are drawn as a curve, because that is the whole life of a newsletter.

Across issues you get the trend: readers, signups, unsubscribes and the average click rate, each with a small chart and a comparison against the period before. That is the view worth checking monthly. The per-issue report is the one that changes what you pick next week.