AWeber Links

[jpch]

AWeber is down right now and has been experiencing issues all morning. So, I just discovered a major disadvantage of enabling the click tracking feature on emails: When their server goes down the links in the email break. I don't know if it works this way with other email marketers but would be curious to know.

[JS_Harris]

Click tracking is important if you want to know how well your emails convert but it is something best done from your own domain or from a stats gathering service like analytics. AWeber employs redirects so the links to your content actually point at AWeber first. What you want is for the links to point at your content. You can track these links using parameters inserted into the URLs directly.

example: example.com/my-awesome-page becomes example.com/my-awesome-page?source=email

If you track in this way I strongly suggest you employ a canonical tag on your pages and that you tell GWT that the parameter does not change page content. I think the AWeber link tracking can be disabled, as can the tracking of most other services.

[jpch]

Thank you for that information...it may prove to be helpful in the future if I need to track the links. At this point I'm more concerned about my open rate vs click rate.

You can disable the link tracking in AWeber. It's on the last step of creating a broadcast when you go to schedule it. It's set to track the links by default so you have to uncheck it.