Back in June, Client Support Specialist Frank Chapman wrote a post on personalizing your messages using field tags. As Frank said, field tags are a phenomenal way to utilize the contact data you have to create relevant, personalized messages. Additionally, field tags can actually be used to complete a URL. While this can be a very powerful tool, there are some things you should keep in mind before you use field tags to complete URLs.
How Does It Work
Any link within a message may include a field tag. A common example is a userid or email address appended as a parameter to a link:
http ://mysite.com/foo/bar?sale=3322fe&custId=%%custid%%
NOTE: For this example, imagine custid is a field you maintain for your contacts.
Links created in this manner are tracked properly, with results showing normally in the click-through tracking report. Because the personalization takes place in the last step in the process (when we actually redirect the URL), the click-through tracking report actually shows the link with personalization tags still in tag format (%%custid%%).
Warning About URLs Entirely Composed Of Field Tags
Currently, we cannot track links that are entirely populated by a tag:
href='%%link%%'
The reason we cannot track this type of URL is that there is no root URL for us to latch onto. In these cases, the link is still inserted into the message, but it is not encoded with a tracking link. Because of this, we have no indication that the link was ever clicked. So if you need or want click-through tracking for this URL, you should not construct the URL entirely using field tags.
Take A Look For Yourself
The screenshot below demonstrates how the application handles click-through tracking for URLs built using field tags. The text in yellow explains each URL and why it was or was not tracked (Click on the image to enlarge it).
Field tags can be a very useful tool, especially if you are using them to complete URLs for your messages. Remember to be mindful of the effects field tags have on click-through tracking and you will be able to create the kinds of messages that get the results you want!
John Gunther
Technical Writer/eLearning Specialist at Bronto
Editor of Brontoversity
Related posts:
- This Time, It’s Personal: Testing Personalization Fields In Your Messages One of the most powerful tools you can use in...
- Tracking The Source Of A Conversion This post is in response to a comment I...
- Dynamically Adding Values To Conversion Tracking URLs In recent weeks, I have been getting a lot of...
{ 0 comments… add one now }