Do clicks from emails have referral data?

[Brent Crouch]

I'm promoting a Click Bank affiliate program using my email list. Every month I include a small ad with affiliate link when emailing my list. I've been able to make 1K every month doing this.

I just realized tonight the terms and conditions of this advertiser has changed. They require special approval to use email marketing. It looks like this has been the case for some time now.

I've never been called on this? Can't they look at server logs and tell my clicks come from emails? I do direct the affiliate link through tinyurl to shorten it. Does this strip referral data? Does clicks from emails even have referral data?

I'm starting to sweat my account being put in jeopardy. I just requested the "special permission". Just a little curious about referral info sent from emails when it redirects.

Thanks for any info.

Brent Crouch

[cuiyj]

as far as I know, referrer data is not available when click from emails.

I think you can append parameter to link in email ( e,g,?ref=emailad )

[Achernar]

If you read your email in your browser with a webmail interface, yes.

[Brent Crouch]

I actually made a mistake in the post. It isn't click bank, it is commission junction. I guess I was up a little late.

I'm guessing when I send my clicks through tinyurl, it strips out the referrer. I've been using email to market this program for nearly a year and have not got a single complaint from CJ. So either they don't know, or they don't care.

I was looking at some of my google analytics stats for a couple of my sites. It is obvious which clicks come from emails. Under traffic sources, I am seeing a lot of referrers like this. us.f361.mail.yahoo.com

I ran a little experiment last night. I sent myself an email that had two links. One goes straight to mydomain.com?directlink and the other links to mydomain.com?tinyurlredirect. Of course, I used tinyurl to redirect to the second one.

I should get access to this data at the end of the day. I'm very anxious to see what the referrer info looks like that came from tinyurl.

Achernar, what I have seen in google analytics proves what you say. There is a referrer sent when clicking from email. I'm just curious if that referrer is stripped out when redirecting with tinyurl?

Thanks for responding

[cgrantski]

Please be sure to post what you find! Interesting question.

[Brent Crouch]

Results are in!

Recap....

Yesterday, I sent an email to my yahoo account. The email had two links.

http://www.example.com/?noredirect

http://www.example.com/?tinyurlredirect (This was actually the tinyurl that directed to this link)

1. I just took a look at my Google Analytics stats. The click that didn't go through the redirect left this as the referrer. us.f451.mail.yahoo.com

2. The click that came from the redirected from tinyurl had no referrer and registered as direct traffic.

[edited by: engine at 7:16 am (utc) on Oct. 4, 2007]
[edit reason] examplified [/edit]

[cgrantski]

What browser did you use to make the clicks in the email? I wonder if the results would be different if you used (IE instead of FF) (FF instead of IE) since they handle transmittal of the referrer differently.

[Brent Crouch]

Good point cgrantski.

My default browser is FF. When I ran this test, I used my yahoo mail and opened right in the browser. I wonder if the result would be different if I did this in a mail program and had the default browser open, I wonder if the results would be different? My guess is yes.

When I drill down the mail referrer in analytics it gives me a referring link. When I click to visit the referring link, it is a yahoo page telling me my session has expired.

I'm going to rerun the test with a few different variables. I'll repost the results later tomorrow.

Brent

[Brent Crouch]

I tried a couple of variations of this, here is what I found.

1. When clicking on an email from a software program like Outlook, there is never any referral data passed no matter what browser you are using.

2. When using web based email, there is referral data passed with IE. FF did not pass referral data in my test. Basically, the referral data in this case is the URL. I used Yahoo mail for my test and the URL was similar to 324.mail.yahoo.com and so was the referral data.

3. No matter if you are using IE or FF, a mail program or web based mail, when using tinyurl the referral data is stripped and the click appears to be direct traffic.

Good Luck,

Brent Crouch