Can links be tracked like this?

That's exactly what you'd do, give each email recipient a different url.

If you don't have a lot of email recipients and you don't have much programming skills, you can accomplish most of what you need to do in MS EXCEL:

Make a spreadsheet with a list of all email recipients along with a unique identifier:

jane@acmebiz.com 1
bob@bobsupplies.com 2
rick@rickswidgets.com 3

... and so on and so forth...

Then you set up the emails such that the link in the email uses the number associated with the recipient in the URI you send them:

----------------------------

To:jane@acmebiz.com
From: me@mysite.com

Would you click my freaking link:
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?param=1

-----------------------------

To:bob@bobsupplies.com
From: me@mysite.com

Would you click my freaking link:
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?param=2

-----------------------------

To:rick@rickswidgets.com
From: me@mysite.com

Would you click my freaking link:
http://www.mysite.com/index.php?param=3

-----------------------------

So once you've sent out those emails, you can check your server or tracking logs and look for any existence of "param=something" in the url.

If you see a hit for "http://www.mysite.com/index.php?param=3" , then you'd know that Rick, or the guy who stole his laptop, has clicked through the link in the email.

This can get more useful if you take note of the paths these people take in navigating your web site. Perhaps you can better gauge their individual interest in what you're offering if you can view their paths. phptraffica can help with individual path analysis.

For instance, if the visitor arrives at http://www.mysite.com/index.php?param=2 , then you know it was Bob. And it would be cool if you saw his path taken to http://www.mysite.com/about-us/ , then to http://www.mysite.com/portfolio/, and then http://www.mysite.com/our-prices/ .

Looking at each individual's path like that might make it apparent what kind's of interests they have.

This kind of stuff would be best done writing a few little scripts, but you could also do it like I mentioned above with Excel to prepare the unique identifying numbers.