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What are Trackable Power Links?

Every email should have a purpose. Virtually every marketing email will contain a call to action which involves the reader clicking a link that takes them to the next stage in a marketing or sales funnel.

Rather than just provide a direct link to the next page or action, good email marketing practice dictates that the clicking action itself is recorded and associated with the contact.

One of the standard reasons for this “click-tracking” is to allow you to start to segment your contacts at a basic level into groups of “interested” or “not”, but arpReach trackable links give you massively powerful additional advantages. Every trackable link becomes a “power link” that allows you to trigger one or more additional actions.  For example, a contact who clicks a trackable link can also be tagged, added to segments for remarketing, moved to a different autoresponder campaign, and have custom form fields added or edited.

Trackable links can also be used to cloak (hide) the URL of the destination web page as this is not shown when the link is inserted into messages.

In this section:

To create a trackable link go to Content / Trackable Links / Create New.

When creating or editing a trackable link the settings are the same:

  • Name – a unique name for the link.
  • Tag – unique tag to insert the link into messages. They can contain letters, numbers, and an underscore ( _ ), but not a dash ( – ).
  • Description – the description for the link. This is never displayed to contacts.
  • Web page to redirect to – the URL of the web page that the contact will be redirected to when they click the link. This option has a test (check) icon to ensure the correct URL has been entered.
  • Post contact – check this box to send the contact data to the redirect page as an HTTP post request.
  • Add contact variables to URL – check this box to add the contact data variables to the redirect page’s URL.

To edit a trackable link, go to Content / Trackable Links / Show List.

… and choose Edit from the Choose action… drop-down menu:

Important Note: While you can edit every element of the trackable link, if you change the actual tag ({LINK_this_bit}), any links in any emails that are using the original tag will break.

The Contacts column shows the number of unique contacts who have clicked the link at least once. Click the number in that column to view those contacts.

The trackable links can be ordered by name or description using the Order by drop-down menu.

The With selected… menu allows you to delete the selected trackable links.

Using the I want to… drop-down menu, you can refresh the Links list screen, create a new trackable link, or delete all trackable links.

Under the Actions column, the Choose action… drop-down menu has options to:

  • Report (graphical charts on click-throughs)
  • Edit
  • Copy
  • Copy then edit
  • Delete

Adding trackable links to your emails

If your trackable link Tag setting is “my_link”, then you would insert this link into your follow-up and broadcast messages using:

{LINK_my_link}

Advanced use on landing pages

Sending your contact data using either of the available methods could be used to personalize the page your contact is sent to with their name.

The Post contact option is more secure than the Add contact variables to URL option. The Add contact variables to URL option appends all of the contacts details to the URL in plain text, while the Post contact option hides the contacts details.

You or your programmer could then extract and display/use the contact’s variables using CURL or PHP.

A PHP example that finds the First Name for the contact is:

$_GET[‘first_name’]

To display the first name of the contact using PHP, you would use a code similar to:

echo $_POST['first_name'];