Troubleshooting Click Tracking

When you turn on click tracking in an email campaign, Mailchimp records how contacts interact with your links. When it's set up and working correctly, click tracking is one way to measure the success of your campaigns. Sometimes, errors in link formatting or deliverability issues can cause problems with click tracking.

In this article, you'll learn about what can cause problems with your click tracking.

Things to know

• To view your click tracking statistics, navigate to the Reports page and click the name of the report you want to work with.
• Click tracking is enabled for all Mailchimp email campaigns by default.

My report shows no clicks

Sometimes, your campaign reports may show fewer clicks than expected, or no clicks at all. Here are some possible causes.

• You don't have click tracking enabled.
  Links in your campaign can only be tracked if click tracking was enabled in the Settings & Tracking section of the Campaign Builder before you sent your campaign. Check the box next to Track clicks or Track plain-text clicks, depending on the campaign type.
• You added URLs as regular text instead of hyperlinks.
  If you type in your URL as regular text in an HTML campaign, it won't be tracked. When you build your HTML campaign, use the link tool on the editor toolbar to create hyperlinks.
• You've only clicked links in the test version of your campaign.
  Only clicks in sent campaigns are tracked in your campaign reports. If you want to verify click tracking is working, be sure you're clicking in a live version of your campaign and not a test version.

Some of my links aren't being tracked

• The URL doesn't begin with http:// or https://.
  We can only track clicks on links that begin with http:// or https://. Clicks on email address (mailto:) or anchor links can't be tracked. To ensure your links are tracked, verify that you're using absolute paths throughout your campaign.
• The click-through link is a system-generated merge tag.
  System-generated merge tags, like *|ARCHIVE|*, *|UPDATE_PROFILE|*, and *|UNSUB|*, can't be tracked or counted toward the total number of clicks in your campaign reports.
• You want to track simple poll or survey clicks.
  Clicks on voting options aren't tracked as clicks in your campaign report. To see how many clicks a voting option received, view the poll or survey results.
• The links have syntax errors or typos.
  A small error can turn your URL into a broken link. Take a look at our troubleshooting article on links to see some common mistakes that interfere with click tracking

My Mailchimp report shows unusually high clicks

• Your campaign is being forwarded.
  Mailchimp adds unique tracking info to each URL in an email campaign. When contacts forward campaigns, those URLs count clicks towards original contact. Unfortunately, there’s no way for us to see if a link has been clicked by the contact or a forwarded recipient. Add a Forward to a Friend link to encourage your contacts to share your campaigns without using their email client's forwarding feature.

• A spam filter may be clicking your links.
  Some aggressive spam filters click links in emails to check for malicious activity before they'll deliver them to the recipients. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to see if a link has been clicked by a spam filter or your intended recipient, but if you see an unusually high number of clicks from a single domain, it's likely to be a spam filter.

My external report shows more clicks than Mailchimp's report

• Mailchimp may be checking your links
  When a campaign is sent, our automated abuse-prevention system, Omnivore, automatically checks the links to ensure that the destination site doesn't contain malicious content or code. Omnivore checks links before our internal click tracking is applied. However, an outside link tracker, like Google Analytics, may register Mailchimp's automatic link validation as clicks.

Contacts say spam filters are flagging my links

• Click tracking is triggering alert messages in users' inboxes.
  Because spammers can hide unsafe URLs behind safe-looking links, some spam filters are suspicious of our tracking redirects. One way to avoid triggering spam filter alerts in recipients' inboxes is by using descriptive text links rather than writing out a URL. For example, use Visit Mailchimp!, instead of http://mailchimp.com/. Unfortunately, any type of tracking link can look like a fraud attempt when aggressive filtering is in place. We don't recommend turning off tracking to combat this rare outcome, but it may be the only option against the most aggressive spam filters.