Manually track links

Introduction

 

Some types of links cannot be automatically traced by ContactLab (they appear in light grey in the summary of links in Create > New campaign). You can track them “manually”, though, by inserting special symbols around the links in order to collect link statistics. These links are generally dynamic, such as: http://www.myserver.it/index.php?user_id=1&name=John&surname=Smith

 

 

Objective

 

Know how to apply the correct syntax in order to manually track dynamic links.

 

 

Syntax

 

The syntax to use is:

 

%{LINK_DESCRIPTION[CATEGORY_ID]%%LINK_URL}%

 

where:

 

LINK_DESCRIPTION is the name of the link that will be displayed in the ContactLab statistics section

LINK_CATEGORY_NUMBER is the numerical ID of the link category managed in the Configure > Categories section of ContactLab. The default category (corresponding to “No category selected”) is 1.
URL_OF_LINK is the static url to track.

 

Note: if the same manually tracked link is present both in the HTML version an the alternate text, pay attention description and category id are the same in both versions.

 

Procedure

 

1. Differentiate the static part of the link from the dynamic part.

 

To track a dynamic link you must “split” it into two parts, a static one and a dynamic one (i.e.: containing variable values).

To be sure that the final link works, its static part must be a syntactically valid link to all effects and purposes.

With a link such as: http://www.server.it/a.asp?p=index&name=${name}$&surname=${surname}$

which evidently contains the two dynamic parameters, name and surname, we can split it in various different ways.

Example 1:

– static part: http://www.server.it/a.asp

– dynamic part: ?p=index&name=${name}$&surname=${surname}$

ortraccman_linkdinamici_2

Example 2:

– static part: http://www.server.it/a.asp?p=index

– dynamic part: &name=${name}$&surname=${surname}$

but NOT in

– static part: http://www.server.it/a.asp?p=

– dynamic part: index&name=${name}$&surname=${surname}$

as in the latter case the static part does not satisfy the rule of having a valid link.

 

We can consequently track the static part as a normal static link (see “Syntax” above), while leaving the dynamic part out of tracking. The rule requires that the two parts of the link determined in this way must always be separated by ? (question mark).

 

Example 1:

 

– static part: %{Description[1]%%http://www.server.it/a.asp}%

– dynamic part: ?p=index&name=${name}$&surname=${surname}$

N.B.: it is not necessary to replace the first character as it is already ?
The complete link is:

 

 

 

Example 2:

– static part: %{Description[1]%%http://www.server.it/a.asp?p=index }%

– dynamic part: &name=${name}$&surname=${surname}$

N.B.: it is necessary to replace the first character & with ?
The complete link is:

 

traccman_linkdinamici_3

 

2. After modifying the html with the syntax for manually tracking the links, save it to a file on your computer.

3. Go to the Message contents sheet in Create > Campaign and press “Load from: a file on your pc” to upload the modified html to ContactLab
4. Press Next to finish the campaign creation process. Send a test deployment and check that the clicks on the manually tracked links are correctly registered in the Analyse > Campaign archive > (campaign name) > Links section.

 

 

Important note

 

The manual tracking system is based on the fact that – as the dynamic links cannot be tracked because they change for each user – the static parts of the links must be manually tracked.

As long as these static parts are identical, as in the example:

 

A: %{Summary[1]%%http://www.server.it/a.asp}%?p=index=${clientcode}$&article=${id}$

B: %{News[1]%%http://www.server.it/a.asp}%?p=index=${name}$&article=${data}$

 

in this case, the system considers link A and link B as the same link repeated several times.

 

One possible solution is to add an ID to the static part in order to tell it apart from the others:

 

A: %{Summary[1]%%http://www.server.it/a.asp?id=1}%?p=index=${clientcode}$&article=${id}$

B: %{News[1]%%http://www.server.it/a.asp?id=2}%?p=index=${name}$&article=${date}$
so that the system recognizes the two links as being different and therefore tells them apart in statistics.