What your email service provider already tracks
Most email platforms rewrite every link in a campaign to pass through their own tracking domain before it forwards the visitor on. That rewrite is what lets the platform log a click against a specific recipient, so before doing anything else, confirm it's actually switched on, since a handful of platforms leave it off by default for transactional sends. This matters more than it sounds. Transactional email, order confirmations, password resets, shipping updates, is often sent through a separate API or integration than your marketing campaigns, with its own default settings that nobody remembers to check until a launch email quietly reports zero clicks.
| Platform | Per-recipient click identity | Click-to-open reporting | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mailchimp | Yes, in the campaign report | Yes | Newsletter-style campaigns with visual click maps |
| Klaviyo | Yes, tied to the customer profile | Yes | Ecommerce sends where clicks need to link to revenue |
| Kit (ConvertKit) | Yes, can trigger automations on click | Yes | Creator sends where a click should start a sequence |
| Resend | Yes, via a link_clicked webhook event | Depends on the dashboard you build on top | Transactional and developer-built sending |
Add UTM parameters to every link, not just the main call to action
Your ESP's own click report only exists inside that platform. If you want the click to show up in your website analytics or your store's order data too, tag the link with UTM parameters before you send, on every link in the email, including the small ones in the footer. People click those more often than senders expect. See what are UTM parameters if you need the basics, or use a UTM builder to keep source and campaign values consistent across every email you send that month.
Send, then check the per-recipient click report
Most platforms will show you a list of exactly who clicked, not just a total. That list is the actual point of email click tracking: it lets you build a segment of "clicked but didn't buy" and follow up with something more specific than a generic newsletter, rather than treating the click count as a vanity metric to report and move on from.
Filter out bot and security-scanner clicks before you trust the number
This is the part most email guides skip. A meaningful share of "clicks" in a B2B send are not people. Corporate email security tools automatically open every link in an incoming email to scan it for malware, often within seconds of delivery and well before a human has actually opened it.
| Security product | What it does | What you'll see in your data |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (Safe Links) | Rewrites and pre-scans links in corporate inboxes at delivery time | A click logged seconds after send, from an IP tied to a security vendor, with no matching open |
| Proofpoint URL Defense | Rewrites links and checks them at delivery and again at click time | Extra clicks that don't line up with real engagement |
| Mimecast and Barracuda | Similar link-rewriting and pre-scan behavior for corporate mail security | Click rates that look high relative to open rates in B2B sends specifically |
You can't fully eliminate this. But you can spot it: a burst of identical clicks in the first minute after sending, concentrated in corporate domains, with no matching open event, is a scanner, not a reader. Weight your analysis toward clicks that happen later, spread across the send window, since those are the ones a person actually generated. If a campaign to a heavily B2B list shows a suspiciously strong click-through rate compared to a similar consumer list, this is usually why, not because the B2B audience is more engaged.
Segment by who clicked, not just how many clicks happened
A click total tells you almost nothing actionable on its own. The list of who clicked is what you can act on: build a follow-up sequence for people who clicked a specific product link and didn't convert, or suppress that segment from a repeat send of the same offer. This is where per-recipient click data earns its keep over a simple click-through rate. A subscriber who clicked three times without buying is a warmer lead than one who opened once and did nothing. And most platforms let you build that segment directly from click history, no exporting required.
Use clicks to trigger the next email, not just to report on the last one
The platforms with automation built in, Klaviyo and Kit in particular, let a click start a sequence on its own: someone taps a product link and gets a follow-up two days later if they haven't purchased, or gets moved into a different segment entirely. That turns click tracking into something that drives the next send, rather than a number you glance at after the fact.
Cross-check email clicks against your website's own analytics
Your ESP will tell you a click happened. It usually won't tell you what the visitor did once they landed, unless the destination itself is tracking that. If your emails point to a multi-link landing page, a "shop the drop" page, or any destination with more than one outbound link, that page's own click data fills the gap: which specific link on the page someone tapped, what country and device they were on, and whether they came back later through the same UTM. Raydar's link analytics capture referrer and UTM data at that landing page level, which is useful specifically for the part of the journey your ESP can't see past the initial click.
One related distinction worth keeping straight: click tracking and open tracking are not equally reliable anymore. Open tracking relies on a tiny image loading, and Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads that image for a large share of recipients regardless of whether they actually opened the email, which inflates open rates in a way clicks are not affected by. If you have to pick one number to trust, pick clicks.
Set up your tracking domain correctly, or clicks come at a cost
Click tracking works by rewriting your links to point through a tracking domain before they redirect to the real destination. If that domain is not properly set up, on a subdomain you own with correct DNS records, some spam filters treat the rewritten link with more suspicion than the original would have gotten, which can hurt deliverability on the very email you are trying to measure. Most platforms handle this for you automatically when you use their default tracking domain, but if you have set up a custom tracking domain, confirm it is verified rather than assuming it inherited your sending domain's reputation.
A pre-send checklist worth running every time
- Click tracking is switched on for this specific send, not just the account default.
- Every link, including footer and unsubscribe-adjacent links, carries a UTM parameter that identifies this specific campaign.
- Source and campaign values match your naming convention exactly, since a stray capital letter creates a second row in every report.
- You have sent yourself a test and clicked every link to confirm the destination is correct before it goes to the full list.
What email click tracking cannot tell you
It cannot tell you why someone clicked and didn't buy. It cannot follow a recipient across devices unless they're logged into something that identifies them on both. If revenue attribution matters more than click counts, that has to happen inside your store or CRM, matched against the UTM parameters you set at send time, not inside the ESP's own dashboard. For the underlying mechanics of how a click gets logged and attributed at all, independent of email specifically, see how to track clicks on a link. And if the tracking pixel used for open rates is unfamiliar territory, what is a tracking pixel covers how that mechanism differs from click tracking.