Track personalized links tracking-personalized-links

The links in email content that contain personalization need specific syntax to be tracked.

Using JavaScript in email content (HTML or Text) allows you to generate and send dynamic content to the recipients, with two limitations:

Pre-processing instructions pre-processing-instructions

You can add specific pre-processing instructions to script the URL and track it. These instructions must be written in JavaScript and start with <%@.

For example:

<%@ value object="myObject" xpath="@myField" %>

This instruction retrieves the value of the myField field from the myObject object.

URL detection url-detection

For tracking detection, Adobe Campaign embeds Tidy to parse the HTML source and detect the pattern. It lists all the URLs of the content so that they can be tracked individually. Adobe Campaign uses Tidy again to replace the URL (http://myurl.com) with a URL pointing to the Adobe Campaign redirection server.

For example, in the initial content: http://myurl.com/a.php?name=<%=escapeUrl(recipient.lastName)%> is replaced for one particular recipient with: http://emailing.customer.com/r/?id=h617791,71ffa3,71ffa8&p1=CustomerName

Where:

Example of non-detection non-detection-example

<%= getURL("http://mynewsletter.com") %> works and sends the actual content of the web page via email to the recipients. But none of the links are tracked. The reason for this is that the MTA executes "<%=getURL(..." for each email before sending. It can be different for each recipient, so Adobe Campaign cannot know the URLs for tracking and assign them a tag ID.

When the page to download is the same for all recipients, the best practice is to use:

<%@ include url="http://mynewsletter.com" %>

In that case, the page is downloaded during the analysis, before the tracking detection. It allows Adobe Campaign to discover the links, assign a tag ID, and track them.

Recommended pattern recommended-pattern

After processing <%@ instructions, the URL to be tracked should have the following syntax:

<a href="http://myurl.com/a.php?param1=aaa&param2=<%=escapeUrl(recipient.xxx)%>&param3=<%=escapeUrl(recipient.xxx)%>">

URL parameters url-parameters

To ensure that personalized URLs are tracked correctly, you must use the escapeUrl() function or the appropriate encoding method for the parameters in your URLs.

Example:

<a href="http://myurl.com/a.php?name=<%=escapeUrl(recipient.lastName)%>">Click here</a>

This will ensure that the personalized parameter is correctly encoded and tracked by Adobe Campaign.

Looping with <%@ foreach %> foreach

The <%@ foreach %> instruction allows you to iterate over arrays of objects loaded in the delivery to track individual links related to the objects.

Syntax

<%@ foreach object="myObject" xpath="myLink" index="3" item="myItem" %>
  <!-- Content to repeat -->
<%@ end %>

Parameters:

Example

In the delivery properties/personalization, load an array of articles and a relation table between recipient and articles.

You can display links to these articles with individual tracking:

<%@ foreach object="articleList" item="article" %>
  <a href="http://example.com/article.jsp?id=<%@ value object="article" xpath="@id" %>">
    <%@ value object="article" xpath="@title" %>
  </a>
<%@ end %>

This allows Adobe Campaign to track which specific article each recipient clicked, rather than just tracking that an article link was clicked.

Best practices best-practices

Related topics related-topics