Ways to track an e-mail sponsorship lead?

[Jon_King]

What is the best possible way to track an e-mail sponsorship lead? For example, we have a customer that is going to be sponsoring a graphic link in an e-mail newsletter. We want to be able to track how many people visit their site as a result of this e-mail.

Any thoughts appreciated.

[amoore]

Make the link point to a page that is specific for that purpose. That can mean either a new page like "www.example.com/mailing.html" or add a query string to an existing page like "www.example.com/index.html?from=mailing". You can show custom information on the page (probably makes more sense in the case of the first URL) such as "welcome mailing list readers..." if you like, but I don't think you have to. You should not have this page linked from anywere else (obvious).

Then, in your log analysis you can look for people that hit that page and see what they did after that.

If you already have an affiliate program, you can make a link for the mailing through that and let it track the leads. That may make things easier for you.

If you get really into it, you can ask the mailing list people if they will let you make the link specific for each person. Something like this: www.example.com/mailing.html?foo=[e-mail] so that you can catch the email address of the user. You can use a hash or an encoding of some kind to obscure the address from the reader. The guys that run the mailing list may not like doing this for you as it allows you to get a lot of their addresses and they'll think you want to spam their readers. Also, it's questionable how kind or ethical or something this is.