Just to add to Peter's comment, the one issue with links via email/newsletters is that they show up as 'direct' traffic with no referral, so they are about impossible to link back to anything w/o the utm params.
Yeah, "direct" traffic is so elusive. It's just a big bucket of visitors. It's a pity because I would have loved to reach out to folks who send this traffic and thank them, or ask for their thoughts on the product...etc.
Mailchimp adds their own trackers on top of the links you insert into the newsletter, which they use for tracking open/click rates, but that's almost less interesting than the source.
Why does it matter that I have a 36% click rate on the last issue, is it good? What if instead I have 10% click rate, but 1 of those people shared it with 10k more?
I understand why in general people don't like tracking, especially here on Hacker News, but I think some of it could lead to much better outcomes for all parties involved. I wonder what other solutions there are to help piece together your audience, and their interests.
Just about any email platform that does link tracking uses this approach and many can set custom UTMs for you automatically with those tracking redirects.
We have a redirect so we can measure traffic in aggregate (we don't track who clicks what) to refine our content over time. But.. I don't believe we get set as the referrer the way we do it (30x redirects). I believe this is why Twitter's t.co redirector DOES use a true "dummy page" as then they get the referral. It's something that might be worth trying though..
Nope, it's what Mailchimp, etc., do. All the outgoing links just fly through their server on the same hostname. We do the same with our hostname.
I have evidence that Google follows these links though, because if you link to a "bad" site even through a redirector, Google notices and will throw you into spam or say you're phishing, etc :-)
Mailchimp adds their own trackers on top of the links you insert into the newsletter, which they use for tracking open/click rates, but that's almost less interesting than the source.
Why does it matter that I have a 36% click rate on the last issue, is it good? What if instead I have 10% click rate, but 1 of those people shared it with 10k more?
I understand why in general people don't like tracking, especially here on Hacker News, but I think some of it could lead to much better outcomes for all parties involved. I wonder what other solutions there are to help piece together your audience, and their interests.