Why we do not recommend link tracking?
Link tracking – what's the trouble?
Link tracking (also known as click tracking) is great for knowing who clicked the link on your emails. But it might negatively affect the deliverability of your emails since such links are being filtered by email service providers.
What if the link on the text Saleshandy.com takes you to amazon.com when you click on it. This can be used as malpractice by scammers to harm the recipients.
A user who opens the tracked link is taken through a kind of web gateway. The user cannot see that gateway (web address changes in the process) and is taken to the actual website right away, but this gateway is enough for the system to record a CLICK from you.
Due to this reason, companies like Google protect their users by monitoring and filtering out messages that contain redirect links. (You can read more about Google's Spam and suspicious emails policy here.)
With a little bit of know-how, you can easily distinguish between clean and tracking links. (Remember, so can your prospects.)
How to check if a link is tracked (contains a redirect)?
- Move your cursor over the link in the message.
- At the bottom of the screen, you will see the full address of that link, whereas: if the link is going to redirect you to another page (for the purpose of tracking or otherwise), it will be different.
Is there some better practice for link tracking?
Yes: a link might be added to a text fragment, just like this one.
While the one here simply takes you to a related article, you can also use this to your advantage with link tracking – text fragments containing tracking links do not pass through strict filtering, and they won't impact your deliverability as much.