How to track URL clicks in your emails

In addition to tracking your email opens with tracking pixels, as walked through in our How to track your emails with tracking pixels article, you also might want to track actual clicks in your emails. Tracking your clicks allows you to measure how engaging your emails and links are. If your email gets a lot of opens but only a few clicks to, for example, your website, you probably want to change some things up to make your mails more engaging. This guide explains how to create tracking URLs for your emails.

What is a tracking URL?

Say you have a web shop that sells smartphone accessories. You want to send out a newsletter with links to discounted accessories: https://yoursite.com/accessories/chargers and https://yoursite.com/accessories/cases. You'd like to know which link gets how many clicks.

With PastePixel you can generate a so-called tracking URL. A tracking URL is a special URL that redirects to your own URL. Whenever someone clicks your tracking URL, some data gets collected. A tracking URL can collect IP-addresses, user-agents and the date & time on which it was clicked. PastePixel support privacy settings in which you can enable or disable IP-address, user-agent, and date & time tracking. PastePixel shows you how many clicks your tracking URL has. The end-user, the person that presses the tracking URL doesn't notice it, because that person gets redirected to your site.

Track email links clicks with PastePixel in 4 steps

Follow the following four main steps to track clicks in your emails:

1. Compose your email
2. Create a PastePixel account
3. Generate and insert tracking URLs
4. Send mail and analyze data

1. Compose your email

Start by preparing your outgoing email. You can compose your email as you normally would. Keep in mind that you'll be replacing some URLs with tracking URLs in step 3.

2. Create a PastePixel account

If you haven't already, create a PastePixel account. Creating an account is free and it allows you generate tracking URLs and analyze your data. We also have premium tiers that allows you to generate more tracking URLs per pixel, analyze more data and gives you more features. Check out our pricing page for more information.

To create an account, you only need to enter your email address and password. After registering you will receive a confirmation email with a link to verify your account. If you have done that, you are all settled.

3. Generate and insert tracking URLs

When you are signed into your dashboard, you'll see all mail trackings that you have created. If this is the first time that you use PastePixel it would be empty. Press the "Create new" button to generate a new tracking pixel.

You first need to give your mail tracking a name. This name will be shown on your dashboard.

After pressing "Create", a tracking pixel will be generated. If you don't want to track email opens, you can simply ignore the tracking pixel. Below your tracking pixel, you see a panel with the title "Urls". Here you submit your URLs that you want to track. Each time you add a URL, it gets added to the list and you'll see the generated tracking URL.

You now need to replace the original URLs in your email with the corresponding tracking URLs.

4. Send mail and analyze data

Now that your email contains tracking URLs and is ready to be sent out, you can send it! If you go back to the page where you generated your tracking URLs and you scroll all the way down, you see the button "Continue to mail tracking". If you press it, you'll be redirected to your mail tracking page. The moment your tracking URLs have collected data, you will see it there in the panel "Urls".

If you want your tracking URLs and pixel to stop collecting data, you can pause it. From this page you can also create exports, view custom data and more. Go ahead and explore it.