News and Announcements

WiscList - Broken Click Through and Open Tracking

Posted: 2016-06-09 09:57:17   Expiration: 2016-06-15 15:21:06

Disclaimer: This news item was originally posted on 2016-06-09 09:57:17. Its content may no longer be timely or accurate.

Update 2016-06-15 3:22 PM:

The issue with clickthrough and open tracking is now resolved - you may re-enable link tracking and open tracking for your mailings at this time. Thank you for your understanding and we apologize for any inconvenience this caused. The information below will be kept for your reference.

We are aware of an issue where if click through link tracking is enabled for a message, all click throughs in that message are broken, redirecting to a page that says "Sorry, but there was a problem processing your clickthrough." We are working with the vendor to get this issue resolved as soon as possible and have made this a high priority with them, but no ETA has been provided as of yet.

We recommend disabling all link tracking on your mailings and lists until we get a resolution from the vendor.

Note: This will take effect only on messages that have not already been sent out. Unfortunately, for messages already sent out, you will need to send a correction email or notify your members that those click through links will be broken.

Disabling Link Tracking on Mailings

  1. Log into ListManager from https://admin.lists.wisc.edu by selecting your list from "My Lists" and clicking "Log into ListManager."
  2. In the left sidebar, click Mailings > Approval > Need Approval to view your list of mailings.
  3. Click the ID of the mailing you wish to edit.
  4. Click the "Tracking" tab and set the "Track all URLs" option to "No." This will disable link tracking for the mailing.

Note: If the test mailing still fails to untrack the links once you've tried this option, then you may need to recreate the mailing from the content. A quick way to determine if your links are still being tracked is to look at the HTML source of the mailing (NOT the content) and see that your links look similar to "%%track {<your link>} –group {html:1}%%". Be sure to follow the instructions below on disabling tracking for your list BEFORE you recreate the mailing.

Disabling Link Tracking on Lists

  1. Log into ListManager from https://admin.lists.wisc.edu by selecting your list from "My Lists" and clicking "Log into ListManager."
  2. In the left sidebar, click Utilities > List Settings > Web Created Content.
  3. Set the "Default with automatically tracking all URLs" option to "No." This will disable link tracking by default for all mailings you create from now on.

Potential Workarounds

If you still would like to see how often people are clicking links in your emails, then we recommend using another service like Google Analytics or go.wisc.edu, which will provide some information on how often a link is clicked.

For more details on go.wisc.edu, you can refer to this KB document: https://kb.wisc.edu/page.php?id=27541.

If you have any questions, please contact the WiscList Administration team at wisclist@doit.wisc.edu. We apologize for the inconvenience and please be assured that we are working with the vendor to get this issue resolved as soon as possible.