Possible to selectively turn off Marketing Cloud email click tracking?

Question

I know I can turn click tracking on or off per-email by unchecking the "Track all links in this email" at send, but I was wondering if there was a way (possibly with AMPscript?) to turn off click tracking only for a specific domain and/or a specific link?

The use case: we'd like to use Firebase Dynamic Links in our emails, but since they leverage the Universal Link framework on iOS, the tracking redirection makes them misbehave. Ideally, though, we'd like all the rest of the links in each send tracked.

Answer 1

The only way I could see to do that would be to insert the link into an ampscript block. You can use a bug that has caused multiple people tons of issues to your advantage.

Sample question on issue
Article about the issue

Sample code to use below:

%%[

   SET @FirebaseURL = [YOUR URL]

]%%

<a href="%%=v(@FirebaseURL)=%%">Click me</a>

This should have the URL be missed from the click tracking sweep through so it will not redirect and instead be a direct link.

EDIT To do it with domain only, you can set it up with either an ampscript variable or personalization string.

AMPscript:

%% [ SET @domain = "http://www.FireBase.com" ]%%

<a href="%%=CONCAT(@domain, '/morestuff')=%%" >Click here </a>

The href should be able to be changed in the editor window through "edit link" or something like that.

Personalization String:

<a href="%%firebasedomain%%/morestuff">Click here </a>

The personalization is pulled directly from the data (however you want to set it up) and csn also can be edited in content block ui.

You may need to tweak a bit each time, but in general this should solve your need.

EDIT To ensure link tracking you should wrap the variable with a RedirectTo() function.

For example: <a href="%%=redirectTo(@FirebaseURL)=%%">Click me</a>

Answer 2

Disclosure: I'm a product manager at Branch and we've been directly focused on these enterprise use cases for deep linking.

Gortonington addressed the workaround for your question, but there is actually a solution for your root problem of Universal Links not working with click tracking.

In order to use this, you need to have the Sender Authentication Package for Marketing Cloud. Note that you can only have one click tracking domain per account, so for testing you might want to try a sub account with its own domain.

The way it works is:

• Marketing Cloud will host an Apple-App-Site-Association (AASA) file for you on your click tracking domain based on your app prefix and bundle ID.
• You update your app's associated domains to include the click tracking domain
• If the app opens using a Universal Link, you resolve the click tracking URL from inside the app.

Note that in this case, your app will open (if a customer has it) for every tracked link. The Marketing Cloud Product team knows about this gap and I believe is working on it, but at the moment there's no way to conditionally open the app, so you need to implement a way to bounce users out of the app if that's not what you want.

• After the app opens, you can conditionally bounce a customer out to Safari. This redirect is pretty quick and not too jarring if done correctly. We've done it using a code snippet, and a parameter for you to use that defines a link as "web_only" but you can write some additional logic that works for your specific case and links.

For additional context: there are lots of gaps with pure native or other third party deep linking solutions that aren't well addressed. We've been working with the Marketing Cloud team on a complete and easy integration for Branch deep links in emails that preserves Universal Link functionality and click tracking (as well as other deep linking like Gmail and Android, etc.). This is our core focus and we've invested time into building relationships and integrations with key marketing channels (not just email).

For email this means we handle the UL resolution with click tracking without client side code, we provide web_only flags for non-deep links, we offer templates and AMPScript for easy deep linking from web URLs, as well as downstream analytics attribution to third party providers (to get a unified view of conversions from email on web or in app). We also have complimentary deep linking products like Journeys (to engage users on web who don't have the app), so definitely consider checking out Branch if you run into issues or don't want to have to build a bunch of workarounds for other link providers.