track-email - Standard Email Tracking Rule
- Ben Clark
Knowing how an interaction with your brand started is very useful. It allows you to personalise the experience making it as relevant as possible. It also allows retrospective investigations into differences in journeys. For instance, how do customers arriving from the monthly newsletter or Twitter journey through your website compared to those arriving directly. Could you improve the interactions to ensure they find what they want at the end of the Journey?
To meet this goal, we need to understand better how people arrive. To assist with this, we have created a Public Rule that can be used throughout our customers marketing, CX and social campaigns.
Simply copy the track-email Rule from the Public Client into your Client to start using it.
As part of the process we will create a “DDERH” parameter derived from the email address of the individual and append this as a query string to the clickthrough URL provided. This provides enhanced tracking functionality through the Alterian tracking rules track-web and track-web-with-conversions when these are also used.
| Tile | Customer Created or Public Template | Purpose | More Information |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Email and Social Input | Public Template | Allows the creation of a Rule that either tracks the email open or tracks the click of a link depending on the data provided. The key difference between this and the Realtime Input template is that the data is passed via the URL querystring instead of the body of a HTTP POST. This allows it to be embedded into links contained in an email, social media post or web page without any requirement for JavaScript | |
2 | Get CXID | Public Template | Identifies the individual | |
3 | Redirect Output | Public Template | Simply provides a output back to the calling system that a redirect has occurred | |
5 | Update Engagement Score | Public Template | Increments the Engagement score. By default it is incremented by 1 each time this Rule is run by a user. Those clicking on multiple links will quickly increase engagement. | |
6 | Track Location | Public Template |
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7 | Write to Log | Public Template | Provides logging to ensure the rule is working correctly. |
Configuration
The same Rule can be used to track email opens and clicks. The parameters passed through control this.
Tracking opens
At a minimum the Campaign and the Recipient (Email Address) are required. Both of these fields will be available via your ISP as elements of personalisation. This URL is linked to the calling of a 1x1 pixel gif that is provided back when called.
The tracking gif by default is hosted by Alterian CX but this can be changed to reference a gif hosted elsewhere if required by configuring the parameter in the Email and Social Input Public Template.
https://acadiantravel.dde.alterian.net/invoke/prod/acadiantravel/track-email?campaign=Newsletter_Jan_2021c
Open Tracking | Required | Description | Maps to… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mandatory | Alterian CX Rule URL |
|
| Mandatory | Campaign name. With eventtype “Open” or “Click” this automatically maps to AlterianQueue_Location | AlterianQueue_Location |
| Mandatory | Recipient or other identifier, for example Twitter handle. Often Email Address is used when tracking emails. This outputs as the field AlterianCX_channelagentid1 by the Email and Social Input to allow automatic mapping. | AlterianCX_channelagentid1 |
Tracking links
This Rule can track any type of link. For simplicity we’ll talk about tracking email link,s but the same logic can be applied to social media posts or other channels.
https://acadiantravel.dde.alterian.net/invoke/prod/acadiantravel/track-email?campaign=Newsletter_Jan_2021&recipient=someone@isp.com&link=hotelscaribbean&redirect=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.acadiantravel.co.uk%2Fcaribbeanhotels-bestof&link=caribbean_bestof
Link Tracking | Required | Description | Maps to… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mandatory | Alterian CX Rule URL |
|
| Mandatory | Campaign name. With eventtype “Open” or “Click” this automatically maps to AlterianQueue_Location | AlterianQueue_Location |
| Mandatory | Recipient or other identifier, for example Twitter handle. Often Email Address is used when tracking emails. This outputs as the field AlterianCX_channelagentid1 by the Email and Social Input to allow automatic mapping. | AlterianCX_channelagentid1 |
&link=hotelscaribbean | Optional | Identification of the link in the email being clicked upon. This allows you to differentiate between multiple links with the same redirect URL. | AlterianQueue_Position |
&channel=email | Optional | This will default to email via a parameter called defaultChannel in the Email and Social Input. If you are calling the same rule via multiple channels the channel can be supplied as a parameter in the querystring. | |
| Mandatory | This is the location that the person clicking will be redirected to. The existence of this parameter informs the Rule that this is NOT a request for open tracking. The redirect URL should be URL encoded. |
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