Use Click Tracking in Emails

Click tracking allows you to see if contacts have clicked links in your campaign. If you have click tracking enabled, your campaign report will show which contacts 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 email campaigns by default. You can, where permitted by applicable law, leave this enabled to see how your subscribers engage with your campaign 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 campaign, Mailchimp adds tracking information to each click-through URL. Each time a contact clicks a link in the campaign, 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 campaign report as a click.

How click tracking looks in plain-text campaigns

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 campaigns don't use hyperlinks to hide Mailchimp's tracking information, subscribers who view your plain-text campaigns will see the full tracking URLs.

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

When your campaign 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 campaign, follow these steps.

1. In the Settings & Tracking section of the campaign 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 campaign, 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 Campaign Builder.

View click tracking in reports

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

You can access detailed campaign click stats from the report Overview, the Click Performance tab, and the Clicked activity page.

In the report overview

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

To view the report overview for a campaign, 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 campaign.
• Click rate
  Percentage of total recipients who clicked any tracked link in the campaign.
• 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 campaign 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 campaign.

On the Click Performance tab

The Click Performance tab tells you how each URL performed in the campaign, 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 Click performance.

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 contacts who clicked that link in your campaign. From there, you can click Export as CSV to download a list of contacts for each link result.

Click View Click Map to see a visual representation of how each link performed in your campaign. 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 campaign.

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 Activity and choose Clicked.
   
4. Click Download to export and save this list of contacts, or click each contact to view their activity for this campaign.

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 campaign to see the number of opens or clicks.