Cannot combine click tracking and recommendation tracking inside an email

Question

With the help of Eliot Harper and Hans Meijer I started to develop a newsletter that contains salesforce marketing cloud web recommendations. However I don't know how it is possible to create a picture with a href that has tracking functionality inside the newsletter and tracking functionality of the recommendation system.

• The variable @link2 contains the web recommendation url that points to the https://nova.collect.igodigital.com/redirect/...
• The variable @image2 contains the imageurl of the product catalog of salesforce.
• The variable @linkwithhref2 contains the complete href set @linkwithhref2=Concat('href="',@link2,'"')

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I tried these options:

Option 1:

<a alias="" conversion="false" data-linkto="https://" href="%%=v(@link2)=%%" style="text-decoration:none;" title=""><img src="%%=v(@Image2)=%%" style="padding: 0px; height: 250px; width: 250px; border-width: 0px; border-color: transparent; border-style: solid; text-align: center;" width="250"></a>

Result 1:

• Good: Tracking functionality of the newsletter works (wrapped to https://click. ...)
• Bad: Clicking the image results that the redirect goes to https://click.ourdomain.com/%%=v(@link2)=%%, which is a bad request

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Option 2:

<a alias="" conversion="false" data-linkto="https://" href="%%=TreatAsContent(@link2)=%%" style="text-decoration:none;" title=""><img src="%%=v(@Image2)=%%" style="padding: 0px; height: 250px; width: 250px; border-width: 0px; border-color: transparent; border-style: solid; text-align: center;" width="250"></a>

Result 2:

• Good: Tracking functionality of the newsletter works (wrapped to https://click. ...)
• Bad: Clicking the image results that the redirect goes to https://click.ourdomain.com/%%=TreatAsContent(@link2)=%%, which is a bad request

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Option 3:

<a alias="" conversion="false" data-linkto="https://" %%=TreatAsContent(@linkwithhref2)=%% style="text-decoration:none;" title=""><img src="%%=v(@Image2)=%%" style="padding: 0px; height: 250px; width: 250px; border-width: 0px; border-color: transparent; border-style: solid; text-align: center;" width="250"></a>

• Bad: Tracking functionality of the newsletter does NOT work (no link wrapping to https://click.ourdomain.com ...)
• Good: Clicking the image results that the redirect goes to https://nova.collect.igodigital.com/redirect/..., and then redirects to our website, which is the behaviour we want to achieve.

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How can i combine both functionalities (click tracking inside the newsletter and click tracking of recommendations). Any comments or hints welcome :)

Answer 1

Try using the RedirectTo() function. Something like:

<a conversion="false" data-linkto="https://" href="%%=RedirectTo(@link2)=%%" style="text-decoration:none;" title=""><img src="%%=v(@Image2)=%%" style="padding: 0px; height: 250px; width: 250px; border-width: 0px; border-color: transparent; border-style: solid; text-align: center;" width="250"></a>

This function is designed to handle all AMPscript variables used as links to ensure they are correctly wrapped for tracking.

ALSO, I have run into cases where with WAC turned on, if you do not have an alias, then it will break the link. So try adding in something like:

<a conversion="false" data-linkto="https://" href="%%=RedirectTo(@link2)=%%" style="text-decoration:none;" title="" alias="Image2"><img src="%%=v(@Image2)=%%" style="padding: 0px; height: 250px; width: 250px; border-width: 0px; border-color: transparent; border-style: solid; text-align: center;" width="250"></a>