Click-through tracking and Click-through rate

This is called Click-Through Tracking. Click-Through is the act of clicking on a link, a banner or other ad, which takes the user through to the advertiser's Web site. Used as a counter point to impressions to judge the response-inducing power of the link. A click-through is registered whenever a viewer clicks on that link or banner ad. This measurement is important to determine whether an ad is successfully getting traffic. To determine the click-through rate, you have to divide the number of responses by the number of e-mails you have sent (multiply this number by 100 to express the result as a percentage).

 MaxBulk Mailer v7 and higher
MaxBulk Mailer v7 (and higher) offers click-through tracking and also message opening tracking thanks to the MLM script that comes for free with the software. MLM stands for Maxprog Mailing List Manager. It is a double opt-in list subscription manager and a message opening/click-through tracking PHP script you have to install on your web site.

- The script is fully explained here.
- The installation of MLM is covered here.
- You will find the User Guide here and a FAQ here.
- The public MLM forum is located here (Previously MLM forum was here).

MLM is the online part of MaxBulk Mailer. It does all what MaxBulk Mailer can’t do by itself. MaxBulk Mailer is a desktop application you run when you need it and quit once you are finished. MLM however is a script running on your web site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. MaxBulk Mailer takes advantage of MLM to perform tasks and to offer services that require full time availability. Imagine you were to maintain your computer with MaxBulk Mailer running indefinitely at home or at the office. This is simply inconceivable, hopefully you don’t have to do that since MLM run on a web server and web servers are always running!

MLM adds two important services to MaxBulk Mailer. On one hand it offers the possibility to maintain lists on your web site allowing your visitors to subscribe or unsubscribe from any of them. On the other hand it adds the possibility to find out what happens to a message once it leaves your computer, if it has been opened by a recipient or if a recipient has clicked on a link. MLM fully integrates with MaxBulk Mailer. Once you have installed MLM on your server and set your subscribe page, everything else is handled transparently. Actually if you did not have to install MLM to your server you would never have heard about it.

 MaxBulk Mailer v6 or lower
MaxBulk Mailer v6 (or lower) has no click-through tracking feature built-in because this is an event that happens outside the program and at a different time, however, if you own a web site and you are allowed to upload and run PHP or CGI scripts, we have a very good solution for you.

That solution comes in two flavors, a PHP and a Perl script. Feel free to use the one you prefer. Both are very similar and simple to use. Just download and place any of them on your server to start tracking click-through in seconds:

- Download Click-Through PHP script (documentation included)
- Download Click-Through Perl script (documentation included)

Note that we are the author of the PHP script and a page dedicated to it can be found here: Maxprog Click-Through PHP Script page.

Look at the readme file included with each script in order to learn how they work. Note that they are quite easy to modify in order to include more features. Currently they track clicked URLs so you can know which ones has been clicked and how many times. You could also track people e-mails for example.

We have checked both scripts here at Maxprog and they work really well.

This is an example of a working URL using the PHP version, 'click.php' for you to test: Click here

and another example using the Perl version 'click.cgi': Click here.

Both simply open the 'www.maxprog.com/' page silently updating a statistic file. The format used is:

http://www.mydomain.com/click.php?link=myURL
and http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/click.cgi?link=myURL

respectively. The same script also gives you access to a special admin page through a URL like:

http://www.mydomain.com/click.php?admin=mypassword
and http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/click.cgi?view=mypassword

respectively where you can see the registered clicks:

You get a URL per line with the total clicks on the right. In our example we have first the example URL we have used above, then a picture, a store URL, a misspelled URL, a subscription system URL and a regular page.

The image URL (#2) is used as a trick to track how many recipients have opened our e-mail. We originally sent an HTML message with online pictures. One of them is embedded into 'click.cgi' URL so we count it as a click-through. The store URL (#3) let us find out how many of the users that have opened the message have clicked to enter our special offer store. This is an example of tracking for one of our campaigns:

The Bounce count is done with eMail Bounce Handler.

Written by Stan Busk
for Maxprog, LLC