If you’re an Exchange admin, the benefits of tracking link clicks in emails may not be immediately obvious to you. But trust me, your marketing guys would die to be able to do it. Why? Because it would let them measure the popularity and results of marketing campaigns ran in emails. Which is somewhere in the Top 5 of things they like to do.
Fortunately, tracking link clicks in email signatures on Exchange is very easy. It requires just one extra step when configuring email signatures. Here’s what you have to do:
1. Add tracking tags to the links that you will want to track. To achieve this you can use the online Google Analytics’ URL Builder or create your own tracking tags. Using a link shortening service (such as e.g. bit.ly) is not advised, as it will most likely cause your emails to be considered as spam.
2. Use the <A HREF> HTML attribute to Insert the links in your Exchange email signature/s:
- Email signatures in Exchange 2010
- Email signatures in Exchange 2013
- Email signatures in Exchange Online (Office 365)
Keep in mind that you can insert hyperlinks both under text. e.g.:
<a href="URL with tracking tags">Visit our website!</a>
as well as under images:
<a href="URL with tracking tags"><IMG src="https://www.mail-signatures.com/static/img/main/pic-1.jpg"></a>
Thats all there is to it. The marketing team can now generate statistics and reports for every email signature campaign they do.
What if I want to track which individual it was that clicked the link? Is there a way to insert the ‘To’ address from the email header as a parameter within the google tracking url?
Hi David,
Sorry, but tracking links is used to measure the general effectiveness of email campaigns. Sending personally identifiable information (PPI) such as names or email addresses to Analytics is prohibited by the Analytics terms of service (for more information, see the last point in Best Practices for creating Custom Campaigns).