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Click Activity reports contain unexpected percentages or click counts

Publish Date: Oct 13, 2022
Description

When viewing the Email Overlay view for Click Activity in a job's tracking results, multiple links show the exact same percentage for the number of clicks, and the total for all percentages on the page exceeds 100%.  In other scenarios you may notice that some URLs do not seem to have all click activity that is expected to be associated with them in the overlay.   These will show underneath the note:
 

"The following are URLs that could not be matched by the overlay. These URLs may be from the text version of the email or may have been generated by Dynamic Content or AMPScript."

Resolution

Why does this happen?


The Email Overlay and Link Name views in Click Activity group URLs together by the Link Name, also known as alias, assigned to them. If no Link Name is assigned to a link, then the Link Name is defaulted to the URL.

If there are multiple links with identical URLs in the email, then the Click Activity tab in the job's tracking results will interpret these as the same link. The Email Overlay view will then display each of these links with the same click percentage, and the Link Name view will group these URLs together.

 

What can I do to prevent this from happening?


Assign each link a distinct Tracking Alias within the Link Properties for each link in the standard email editor. Alternatively, you can assign each link a distinct Link Name by setting the alias parameter of the <a> tag for each link.
 

What if my do have alias tags but I am still seeing a number of URLs show up under the following section:


"The following are URLs that could not be matched by the overlay. These URLs may be from the text version of the email or may have been generated by Dynamic Content or AMPScript."

Multi-Part Mime is used for emails which means that both a text version and a HTML version of an email will be delivered to most customers, unless they have a HTML Email preference set to NO.  Given this scenario it is possible for links to still show up in this list as any clicks from a text version will not have an <A>/Alias tag meaning that they will not be able to be grouped with other tracking which is associated to a particular alias.   Typically this behavior occurs from security software that scans email links but can also occur from subscriber inbox activity. 

If this situation occurs there is no way to guarantee that all links will be grouped into the same alias.   To work around this you can aggregate your data by URL content (the physical location that is being linked to in the URL if it is predictable) via SQL Activity to achieve the same result that the overlay would deliver with this grouping.   

  
Knowledge Article Number

000386793

 
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