However, as great as all that is, there is no native capability in the Salesforce.com campaign system to track click-throughs (or "click-thru" depending on your preference). Now what I mean by that is that when you send an email to your list of recipients, you'll frequently have links in that email, inviting the reader to click through to your website or to various landing pages. The marketing manager is always going to want to know how many people clicked on a particular link. This is useful for testing and improving the marketing message. What do you do though if Salesforce has no native capability to track this?
There are some third party applications that can do this for you, but price a few of them - they'll run thousands and thousands of dollars - PER YEAR!
An Inexpensive Alternative
There is a better way! Well, by better I mean easier and less expensive.Salesforce.com has what they call "Sites." It is a system that lets you publish anything you desire from your Salesforce org publicly to the web. We use it for forms, for portals, for applications - for anything where you want to interact with individuals who are not license holders in your Salesforce.com org.
By virtue of that powerful system we can setup a method of tracking click-throughs. Here is how we do it. We setup sites so that you have a domain (like yourcompany.force.com). Then we deploy a page to your site, named something like "tracking", and on that page we have some code to manage the tracking of a view and a redirect to where you really want them to land.
So the site address would be:
http://yourcompany.force.com/tracking
Now, the key is what comes as a parameter on that page.
Use Salesforce Campaigns and Sites
In Salesforce, in a new separate object under the Campaign, we setup an object called "Email Link" or something similarly named. The main field on that object is an auto number field. After that we have two other fields, one is an input field where you enter the link that you want to put in your email. The other field is a formula field that returns the link you'll actually put in your email - which is completely different than where you want to send your reader. Let me explain.In the email, there will actually be placed a link to your sites page, that link is similar to what I showed above. That link will also contain a parameter, so fully formed it looks like this:
http://yourcompany.force.com/tracking?LinkID=0004
The link ID is the auto number in the Email Link record that you setup.
So let's say you wanted to place a link in your email to www.greatcompany.com, but you want to track the click throughs. You'll make a record in your Email Link object under the campaign. One like this:
Now, instead of placing http://www.greatcompany.com in your email as a link, you place http://yourcompany.force.com/tracking?LinkID=0004 as a link instead.
Track Click-Thru Rates in Salesforce
On the sites page, when someone arrives there with the URL populated with that LinkID, the code can find the email link record associated with that number, find the actual destination link, and redirect them to the actual http://www.greatcompany.com link. BUT - while they are there, we'll track the fact that they arrived there and were redirected. Plus, while they are there we can pick up a few details about them such as their IP Address and Browser. All these details we save into a Click Through record. This record is in another custom object that lives under the Email Link object.So the data model looks like this:
(You can see my example near the bottom of the picture above).
Report On the Click Throughs to Your Campaign
Those links can now be easily reported on using a custom reports that you can easily make in Salesforce.com.Would you like to have this system? If you have a developer, then they can fairly easily build you such a sites page, the logic shouldn't be too difficult for them to figure out.
If you'd like us to do it, we charge a flat rate of $1500 to install this system into your Salesforce org (an enterprise level org or above) and give you some training on how to use it and build you some reports to show those click throughs per campaign. We can even make some minor tweaks to the code if you need those. Most likely we could include that in the price quoted above. For more significant changes, we'll estimate those separately.
No Subscription Required!
That is a one time charge for our effort to install this system and get it setup for you - that means NO ONGOING SUBSCRIPTION FEES!Would you like to discuss having us install this click through tracking system into your Salesforce.com org? If so, reach out to us at the contact us page at www.snapptraffic.com. We could have this installed and working for you in just a few hours.
