Use Click Tracking in Emails

Click tracking shows you how many recipients clicked links in your email. If you have click tracking enabled, your email report will show which recipients clicked your links and how many times each link was clicked. Like open tracking, it can help measure subscriber engagement.

In this article, you will learn how to control, review, and interpret click tracking.

Before you start

• Click tracking is enabled in Mailchimp emails by default. You can, where permitted by applicable law, leave this enabled to see how your subscribers engage with your email content.
• Improper link formatting and other issues can cause problems with click tracking. To learn more, read Troubleshooting Click Tracking.

How click tracking works

When click tracking is enabled for an email, Mailchimp adds tracking information to each click-through URL. Each time a recipient clicks a link in the email, the tracking information redirects them through Mailchimp's servers and sends them to the intended web address. That redirect through our server is logged in your email report as a click.

How click tracking looks in plain-text emails

To track a click, the original URL has to be replaced with one that points to our servers and redirects to the destination URL. Because plain-text emails don't use hyperlinks to hide Mailchimp's tracking information, recipients who view your plain-text emails will see the full tracking URLs.

Before the plain-text version of your email is sent, links will look something like this example.

When your email arrives in recipients' inboxes, the plain-text click tracking will look something like this example.

Turn click tracking on or off

To turn click tracking on or off in a regular email, follow these steps.

1. In the Settings & Tracking section of the email builder, click Edit.
   
2. Check the Track clicks box to enable click tracking, or uncheck the box to disable click tracking. To manage click tracking in the plain-text version of your email, check or uncheck Track plain-text clicks.
3. Click Save.

Be aware that when you disable click tracking, you are disabling your ability to track and report on clicks. This does not affect Mailchimp's use of this data for abuse mitigation purposes. For example, Mailchimp will continue to redirect URLs for users with free account plans to protect against malicious links.

When a paid user turns off click tracking, Mailchimp will continue to redirect their URLs until certain account activity thresholds are met. This gives us time to monitor account activity for potential abuse and ensure high deliverability rates.

Any third party tracking options that you have enabled will need to be disabled individually within the Settings & Tracking section in the email builder.

View click tracking in reports

Click tracking tells you how your recipients interact with your content and whether they want to visit the destination URLs in your email. Mailchimp reports provide a few different metrics for measuring click activity.

You can access detailed click stats from the report Overview, the Click performance tab, and the Recipient activity page.

In the report overview

The report overview gives you a broad summary of how well an email performed.

To view the report overview for an email, follow these steps.

1. Click Analytics, then click Reports.
2. Click the name of the report you want to work with. This will take you to your report overview.

Here’s some of the click tracking information you’ll see in your overview.

• Click performance
  Includes a list of top links clicked and a shortcut to your Click Map, which is a visual tool that shows you exactly where people clicked in your email.
• Click rate
  Percentage of total recipients who clicked any tracked link in the email.
• Clicked
  Number of recipients who clicked any tracked link. Click this number in your report to open a list of subscribers who clicked.
• Clicks per unique opens
  Percentage of recipients who opened your email and then clicked a link.
• Total clicks
  Total number of times any tracked link was clicked. This count includes multiple clicks from individual recipients.
• Last clicked
  The most recent date and time someone clicked a tracked link in your email.

On the Click performance tab

The Click performance tab tells you how each URL performed in the email, and also includes a link to your Click Map.

To view individual link results on the Click performance tab, follow these steps.

1. Click Analytics, then click Reports.
2. Click the name of the report you want to work with.
3. Click the Click performance tab.

Here, you'll see your tracked URLs and the number of total and unique clicks for each. Click the numbers next to each URL to view the recipients who clicked that link in your email. From there, you can click Export as CSV to download a list of recipients for each link result.

Click View click map to see a visual representation of how each link performed in your email. To learn more about this tool, check out About Click Maps.

In Clicked activity

Your Clicked activity includes a list of all recipients who clicked any tracked link in the email.

To view Clicked activity in your report, follow these steps.

1. Click Analytics, then click Reports.
2. Click the name of the report you want to work with.
3. Click the Recipient activity tab, then choose Clicked.
   
4. Click Export recipients to export and save this list of recipients, or click each recipient to view their activity for this email.

You can also get a general overview of both open and click statistics from the Campaigns page in your account. Hover over the open or click percentage for any sent email to see the number of opens or clicks.