Email Campaign - track clicks?

[Techno]

I wasnt sure if this would be the place to post but...

how does "it" work where if say the server sends out literally hundreds of emails to an approved list of client email address for a marketing campaign...
and within the email template, includes links.

How is it possible to track which user clicked on which link for which email?

I know of course there are some solutions out there like MailChimp that do this but curious to know how its done/what methods are used.

Thanks

[davebat]

A link takes you to a webpage, on the webpage there will be some tracking activity. A querystring from email can be used for identification

[Techno]

thats what I thought.
However it would be that the url would have to point to "our" server, which intercepts the request via HTTPModule, does the logging/tracking, and then finally forward to the right link url

[techgnome]

correct... usually in the query string is some kind of ID... think about hose bit.ly works... it takes a full url, condenses it down to just a few characters, then stores that as the key and the full url as the value... then when that ID is hit, the URL is retrieved and a redirect happens.

samething in your case... you have a url in the email that points to your servers and includes some kind of code. The code can be campaign specific (meaning everyone gets the same url) or it can be recipient specific (each user within the campaign gets a unique ID).

-tg

[gep13]

thats what I thought.
However it would be that the url would have to point to "our" server, which intercepts the request via HTTPModule, does the logging/tracking, and then finally forward to the right link url

That's right, and a number of systems already do this for you. Systems like MailChimp, and SurveryMonkey already have the ability to add campaign information into an email shot, so you can see how effective, or uneffective a particular campaign was.

Gary

[Techno]

Thanks all