tracking clicks from a newsletter

what is the best method?

[gibbon]

Real newbie question in this area - preemptive sorry if it is a stupid question.

We are about to produce our first real html newsletter.

We wish to track clicks from this newsletter to gauge effectiveness.

It has been suggested to me that we put a "refId" on the end of our urls to log clicks from the newsletter into our database. This would simply show the front page content as normal.

such as:
www.domain.com/?refID=newsletter

shows the content in:
www.domain.com

I am worried in doing this we would be seen to have duplicate pages.

Does anyone have an idea whether this would be the case, or whether there is a better way to track newsletter clicks.

Thank you in advance

[pendanticist]

Does anyone have an idea whether this would be the case, or whether there is a better way to track newsletter clicks.

There is a bit of information here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Pendanticist.

[gibbon]

further point would links that point to the same page top & bottom like this:

top of page <a href="contact.html?top">contact</a>
bottom of page <a href="contact.html?bottom">contact</a>

would this be considered as "duplicate pages" as the url is different for two pages but the content is the same?

[Waterloo]

We send them to a special landing page that is like our front page so we exclude it from being crawled.