As I’ve mentioned before, I use AWeber to manage my mailing list, and I’m generally pleased with the way that it works. Recently though, I discovered a major problem with the AWeber link tracking feature. I’ve lost data, but have learned how to avoid the problem in the future. As is often the case with computer problems, it was user error!
Add Links in Newsletters
When I send out my weekly Excel Newsletter, I always add a few links to Excel articles. A couple of the links are to other websites, where interesting articles have been posted.
The remaining links are to articles on my Contextures Excel Blog, or to a page on my main Contextures website.
AWeber Link Tracking
If you leave the AWeber link tracking feature turned on, you can see the number of times that each link was clicked. That’s a great tool for seeing what your readers are interested in, and planning your articles for future newsletters.
I’ve been downloading the stats for each newsletter, and sometimes I’m surprised by which links are the most popular. But it’s always fun to check the statistics, and see where the readers went.
No Link Tracking Found
After downloading my latest newsletter’s stats though, I was surprised that nobody had clicked on the first link. It was an article and video about VLOOKUP sorting problems, and had been popular on my blog, and in the social media where I posted the link.
Why hadn’t even one person clicked that link in the newsletter? Then I noticed that nobody had clicked the second link either – it was to another article on my site. Very strange.
A Different Type of Link
I checked the links, by clicking them in my copy of the newsletter, and they worked correctly. When I took a closer look at the links, I noticed that those links had hash tags in them, to take you to a named location on the page. I didn’t want people to have to scroll through a long page to find what they needed.
For example, here is the link to the VLOOKUP article – it goes to the name “sort”.
http://www.contextures.com/xlFunctions02.html#sort
Maybe that was the problem. As you can see in the screen shot below, that name gets stuck onto the end of the redirected link, instead of staying with the website page name.
Missing Tracking Code
That was a good theory, but when I checked my other statistics, there were a few links with those hashtags, and they had worked correctly.
But why was it only messing up on links to my main website? All the links to other sites, and to my Contextures blog, were tracked correctly.
Finally, I remembered that I had set up Aweber’s web analytics, so it would use my domain name in the tracking link, instead of “clicks.aweber”.
So, I went to the Analytics Setup page (Manage Lists > Reports > Settings), to see what was wrong.
My site address was listed there, and I checked that it was entered correctly. Next to the site address was a link — Get Javascript.
Doh! I had installed their javascript tracking code on a couple of pages, and those were the ones where the links were tracked correctly — with or without hashtags. However, there were lots of other pages where I hadn’t installed that code.
Fix the Problem
So, I clicked the link and copied the code, and pasted it onto some key pages of my website. I also created a library in Dreamweaver, so I can quickly insert it on all the pages, and update it whenever necessary.
Anyway, I’ve forever lost all the data for any previous newsletter links that went to my web pages with missing tracking code, but a good lesson was learned.
In future, I will check each page before I link to it, and make sure that I’ve pasted in the Aweber tracking code.
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