Yesware Launches Link Tracking

Link Tracking has been a much-requested feature for a really long time. Late last year, we invited 100 brave souls to beta test our approach to it and got mostly positive feedback. After working out a few bugs, Link Tracking is ready to share with Yesware users everywhere!

Link Tracking

How To Turn It On and Off

It’s really easy – if your email is Tracked, both your opens and your link clicks will be tracked. If you de-select Tracking, neither opens nor links will be tracked. We don’t have the ability to select one or the other only. If that feature would help you, email support@yesware.com and let us know!

 

How it Works

Before Gmail sends your email, we create a redirect link from every blue underlined link you are sending. When a reader clicks the link, they ping our tracking server and then we send them to your original destination. There should be minimal additional time associated with this extra step.

What Your Reader Sees

Most people won’t see any difference between tracked and untracked links. If they read email with a modern web-based or client application, they are most likely reading text in either Rich Text or HTML formatting, both of which obscure the destination of the link.

Exception #1 – If your reader is reading email in plain text, they’ll see longer, uglier links like this:

 

Exception #2 – If your reader has spam filtering software dialed up high enough, they could get warnings in their email subject line something like this:

 

After extensive testing with our beta users, we believe that the benefits of link tracking far outweigh these particular problems. But we’re always interested in hearing your feedback, so please let us know how this goes.

What You’ll Notice

When a reader clicks on one of your tracked links, you’ll see a message like this in your Inbox Dashboard:

 

You’ll also see new click events in your message reporting. We are looking at ways of adding more link click data in other reports, so again, please let us know if you have any great ideas.

Thanks to all the awesome folks who offered to beta test this feature for us. Another feature for you all!