Custom Links and click tracking

Hi All,
I am using a custom link on the email.
http://mysite.com/?email=[EMAIL]
This creates a link and sends the email on the url, that then gets used on the page it lands.
This works OK
However I am facing an issue in the click stats, as per each custom link (as above) it creates one entry. I know this is out of the normal behaviour but just wanted to know if someone else faced this, how they solved it. And also if some developer can point me to what files should I have a look at to see if my knowledge allows me to code something to solve this issue.

Thanks and Keep Up the Great Work!

Billy

Hi, I am the community manager rather than a dev. I am just wondering if you could clarify this bit:

a little more. Can you send a test email for me anna@phplist.com so I can see what exactly the outcome is? or you could explain it in more detail.

Thanks

a
x

Same issue here. We are using our own subscribe/unsubscribe/edit preferences system for newsletter subscribers and in every message we send to our subscribers there is a link to unsubscribe or edit newsletter preferences with an encripted client id as one of the parameters in the URL. The whole thing works very well except that PHPList is creating a huge list of links in the database, as every unsubscribe /update link is unique due to the unique client ID.

Is there any way to avoid this?

@billygk: If you are using Google Analytics, please be aware that you’re not allowed to store personal information about your visitors. And that includes the email address. Use some kind of client id instead.

1 Like

I think I get it now, as we recently did something that resulted in the same thing. I made a feature request

https://mantis.phplist.org/view.php?id=17757

Yes anna, that is the issue. Maybe one of the options could be the ability to mark those links you do not want to track, in the email template, for example? Of course, only for links that you’re not interested in, like unsubscribe or change preferences in my example, as we’ll know who unsubscribed or changed preferences from within our CRM.

I stumbled upon the same issue and have another possible solution to propose. I’ve posted it in the feature request > https://mantis.phplist.org/view.php?id=17757#c58664

I believe this would be a more versatile solution since it allows to ignore links based on a pattern (specific url parameters) instead of not needing to define every link you want to ignore