Email clicks not being tracked but webpage visits are

[PennyH]

We recently sent an email campaign; the main CTA was a click to a Marketo Landing Page.

In the reporting I could see, of the people who were sent the email 30 people had visited the webpage ( activity: Visit Web Page recorded), but no email click was recorded, the open was recorded.

I did ask Marketo Support about this, and they explained that these customers would have disabled email click tracking but accepted web tracking.

Has anyone else experienced this? Are there any good articles on this topic?
Also, is there anyway to work out what % of our customers have disabled email click tracking?

( The Marketo Landing Page was not shared any other way and these clicks did follow the email send and open activity).

Thank you

[uditmathur]

Hi @PennyH ,

Are you using a token to display the webpage URL?

[PennyH]

Hi @uditmathur 

Thank you for commenting. 

No, I am not using a token to display the URL. 
Although I had 30 missing clicks, I did get 700 that were tracked.  

[SanfordWhiteman]

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I did ask Marketo Support about this, and they explained that these customers would have disabled email click tracking but accepted web tracking.

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Hmm, doesn’t make much sense on a technical level.You can’t “disable email click tracking” and still have the tracked link work at all.

That is, a tracked Marketo link is written to bounce off your branding domain. It’s possible for someone to block URLs that look like Marketo URLs — using a DNS lookup, for example, to see that it points to Marketo. But then the link won’t work at all: you can’t skip the tracked link and go directly to the LP without following the tracked link.

To put it another way, you can’t just “strip off” the tracking from a tracked email link. There’s no way to turn it into a navigable link without peeking at where it’s gonna go next. And the act of peeking registers a click.

[PennyH]

Thank you for responding. 

If I understand you correctly, the explanation from support cannot be correct. 

Have you seen this behaviour before, do you know what could explain it? 

I have included a screenshot of 4 x contacts activity history, (no click for this email is recorded earlier or later)

Thank you 

[SanfordWhiteman]

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If I understand you correctly, the explanation from support cannot be correct. 

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That’s right!

It’s not possible for 2 people to have the same link, tracked in both cases, but one of the people skips the Click Link yet still gets to the page. If a link is tracked, and there’s no untracked version of it lying around, the only way to get to it is via the tracked link.

Are you 100.00% sure that the untracked person reached the page from the exact same email as someone who was tracked? If there’s a variant of the email in which, for some reason, the link wasn’t tracked, that would present an alternate route. Or perhaps the same page is linked multiple times in the email and not all links are tracked?

[PennyH]

Hello 

Thank you for taking the time to respond. 

There is only 1 email, the link is only in one place in the email and I checked it is set up as expected. So just one link.

It seems an anomaly if you have never come across this.  If I ever work out an explanation I will come back and update the ticket.

Thank you

[SanfordWhiteman]

My only explanation would be that the click tracking server wasn’t reliably logging hits for some brief period, while still redirecting people correctly. Pretty weird!