Click-Tracking in Composer

Overview

Emails sent with Composer have the ability to track links that are clicked by recipients, enabling schools to discern which linked content is viewed in emails. This feature is enabled per email in the final “Confirm and Send” stage of the Composer email process, and click statistics are available on the “Engagement” tab of the email communication record.

Some examples of using the feature are:

• In an email to prospective students with links to different athletic teams’ web pages, the school can see who clicked the basketball link, who clicked the baseball link, etc., and then have the respective coaches reach out to those students.
• In an email to field trip participants that includes a link to the itinerary, it is possible to see who viewed it.

Note: This feature currently is enabled only for Composer emails launched from Axiom. It is not available for teachers via their Portals.

Enable Click Tracking

Click tracking is enabled on a per-email basis, and tracks all links in the email, including those in the footer, social media links, etc. To enable link tracking in a Composer email, select “Track Links” from the final “Confirm & Send” page of the workflow.

How it works: Tracking is enabled by transforming the URLs of links. For instance, a simple URL to www.google.com might be transformed into a long URL that looks like http://email.dev.veracross.com/c/eJxV jUeOgyAPAF-jRwIrInvgoE36DYOwKhHFqNU-v7… 

Links that are clicked will briefly redirect in the browser from the long URL to the simple one. The process is swift (usually under one second, often nearly instantaneous) and will not be noticed by the majority of users.

All Links Are Tracked

Not only are all clicks tracked in the email sent to the original recipients, but because the tracking is based on the system-generated “long” URL, clicks are tracked from forwarded versions of the email as well.

Links in forwarded emails are tracked, but note that they reflect the original recipient’s email address, not the forwarded email recipient.

View Click Statistics

To view clicks in an email, navigate to the record of a sent email and click the “Engagement” tab. On the top of the screen is displayed  information for the whole email, including percentages of deliveries, opens, and bounces. The “Clicks” section displays overall click statistics:

• Click Tracking Enabled? Displays “Yes” or “No.” This field must be set when the email is sent, and is read-only here.
• Clicked. Displays the number of recipients who clicked at least one link.
• Clicked Percent. Displays the percentage of recipients who clicked at least one link.

The bottom of the screen shows statistics for each link that has been clicked at least once:

• Person Email. The email address of the recipient who clicked the link. See above note on forwards.
• URL. Which link was clicked.
• Record Count. The number of times it was clicked by that person. It will typically be 1, and only more if a person clicks the same link more than once.

Statistics for individual emails are also available on the Email Stats Overview document, accessed in two places:

• On the Communications homepage in the Recently Sent emails, Stats Overview column.
• On the General tab of an email detail screen, there is a Stats… link.