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Best Way to do Aweber Emails/Linktracking?

by Builder154
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I've read a few threads on this but still not clear on the best way to do this.

I want to be able to track clickthroughs as thoroughly as possible. So I set up 301 redirects on my site's domain to each affiliate product, different ones for different webpage links and autoresponder links.

But then I found that if a link is just a 301 redirect with no actual page, the clicks won't show up in my host stats or Google Analytics. So it gives nice clean links, but no way to track them using those clean 301 links.

(The main pages on my site are not in Wordpress so I can't use Pretty Link).

Oh well. Using Clickbank tracking ID's I could at least clearly track which clicks are going there.

But still there are links to my web pages and to another non-clickbank affiliate product that can't be tracked that way.

Well luckily AWeber has click tracking so I should be able to at least track all clicks through there. However, I set up all my autoresponders as text emails, tested them and thought I was done. Then I signed up for my first optin myself, got the welcome email and of course all the links look like crap since they were changed to click.aweber.blahblahblah. Totally defeats the purpose of making nice pretty 301's and I would think makes people a lot less likely to click them.

How do you handle all this? Do you use HTML autoresponses or HTML and also a plain text version (and how the heck do you offer both for the same email? I can't figure that out). I wanted to use plain text, but now it seems I have to use HTML just to have the links both be tracked and not look ugly.

And what do you do with your links to make sure you can track them all? How do you handle 301's and so on so everything is trackable on non-Wordpress pages?

I'd especially like to hear from some experts who know the pros and cons of the different ways and have thought this through. Thanks.
#aweber #emails #emails or linktracking #linktracking
  • Profile picture of the author Builder154
    Having talked to AWeber, I think I have this figured out as best as it can be other than two things. From what I can gather:

    There is no way to track links in plain text emails without adding hideous code to the end of them. So that means I basically have to do them in HTML.

    The only question I have about the AWeber links is this.

    In the plain text versions of my emails, I used my pretty, clean 301 redirect links as their own clickable text. In the HTML, I have the choice of doing that or using other anchor text instead. I'd actually rather keep the emails how I had them with the URL's as anchor texts themselves in some cases. I mean I made those clean 301 links just for that and I think they look nice. And I like the plain text look for the emails.

    But the problem is I saw a comment on a blog where the CEO of AWeber said that if you do that, the AWeber tracking URL that is added and which actually becomes the hyperlink will differ from the URL you have as your anchor text for that link and that difference will trigger spam filters making your email more likely to go to the junk mail.

    Does anyone know if this is true? Is it risky to use a URL anchor text that differs from the actual hyperlink? It makes sense and I can see why spam filters would be on the lookout for that. And this is the CEO of AWeber saying it, no less, who you'd think would know. This was a couple years ago though so perhaps it's changed?

    I see quite a few autoresponders from people that do use the URL's as their own anchor text along with different tracking code as the actual URL. I would like to do that, but not if it is going to keep my emails from even getting to their recipients.

    My only other remaining question is how are people tracking clicks to affiliate programs that don't have their own tracking ID's? Like I mentioned, setting up different 301's won't work if I'm not in Wordpress and can't use something like Pretty Link because Analytics doesn't see those clicks if there is no actual page on my domain redirecting that 301. Any solution for that?
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  • Profile picture of the author Blanca1bbb
    Banned
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    • Profile picture of the author Builder154
      Originally Posted by Blanca1bbb View Post

      I use Market Samurai, as well. The price tag may 'appear' high, however, IMHO, it is the best....and that price tag has paid for itself very easily.
      This has absolutely nothing to do with this thread.
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