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WiscList : Tracking Messages

This tutorial will introduce the tracking features of WiscList and how to incorporate them into your mailings. In WiscList, you have the ability to track the number of people who opened up your mailings and the number of times links you placed in the message were clicked.

Important!

The tracking feature only works if a recipient can or chooses to view messages in HTML. Therefore, it is a good idea to determine how many recipients in your list are "HTML capable". At least one member in your list must be HTML capable in order for tracking to be enabled. The following section will show you how to set a member to be HTML capable so that you may begin using the tracking feature. We will discuss how to automatically detect HTML capability further in the tutorial. For now, it is important that we manually enable it in for one member in order to use tracking.

Manually Enabling HTML Capability

  1. Log into the WiscList Administrator interface at https://lists.wisc.edu with your login and password.

  2. Navigate to Utilities : Members and select a random member (or preferably yourself) by clicking on his or her email address.

  3. Click on the Advanced Settings tab and set HTML capability detected to "yes", as show below:

  4. Click the Save button to save the setting.

Enabling Tracking

You need to enable tracking for your list before you can use this feature. To do this,

  1. Navigate to Utilities : List Settings : Basic Information : Enable Features

  2. Set Default with open tracking and Default with HTML detection to "yes", as shown:

Creating Content

The first step in sending a mailing with trackable links is to create content.

  1. Navigate to Content : New Content.

  2. View our documentation on the New Content screen before continuing.

  3. To insert a trackable URL within a Text or HTML message, click on the Insert URL button:

  4. You can choose from the following types of trackable URLs. Please see our Advanced Tools page for more information about these options.

    1. Clickable Text - Inserts a phrase into the mailing that, when clicked on, goes to a designated address. Similar to an HTML hyperlink.

    2. Clickable Image - Places an image in the mailing that, when clicked on, goes to a designated address.

    3. URL - Simply places the destination address in the mailing with no clickable text.

  5. When you have completed your content, click the Save button to save it. Now you will need to import the content into a mailing.

Creating a Mailing

  1. Navigate to Mailings : New Mailing.

  2. You will not need to fill out any of the forms in the "Message" tab. We'll import the content we just created to fill those in for us. To do this, click the Import Content button.

  3. Your content should now appear in the various fields on this screen. Click on the "Tracking" tab to configure additional tracking options.

  4. In the "Tracking" tab, you can set Track opens to "yes" if you would like to see how many HTML-enabled users open the email. If you'd like to use this message to determine which users of your list are able to view HTML email, set Detect HTML capability to "yes".

  5. Click on the Save button to save the message in the "Needs Approval" table. You may also opt to select Save and test to see how your message will look.

  6. You will be brought to the "Need Approval" table. Here, you will need to click on the Send button next to your message to send the message.



Viewing Tracking Reports

  1. Navigate to Home : Activity. Under "Recently Completed Mailings", you can select either Overview for general information about the mailing, Opens for open statistics for the mailing, or Clicks for URL tracking statistics for the mailing.

  2. You can also find additional tracking reports under Reports : Mailings : Tracking Statistics.

Automating Tracking

If you would like to automatically track all the URLs in a message, click the Track All URLs button after composing your message in Content : New Content. This will take any link you put in the message and put the necessary code in to track it.

Additionally, you can set Automatically track all URLs when creating content to "yes" under Utilities : List Settings : Web Created Content to automatically insert tracking code after you've saved your content.