Tracking In-Text Hyperlinks

[JonathanBr1]

I have a campaign landing page in AEM with hyperlinks within the body of the page to other AEM pages. Is there a way to track the number of times that hyperlink is clicked on the campaign page? 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

One of the simplest methods is to create an "Internal Campaign" tracking (ITM or ICID) using a Visit Level (or I suppose longer, but with custom attribution, Visit should be sufficient) expiry.

Similar to how you track your external campaigns (UTM or CID) into s.campaign (eVar0 / Tracking Code), you would capture and store your internal campaigns into your custom eVar specifically for linking within your site.

You can also get some interesting cross results between your external campaigns (what drove people to the site) and your internal campaigns (what drive people within the site during their visit).

Internal Campaigns don't have to be as detailed as external campaigns, because you already have access to the user's journey within your sites (Activity Map, Previous Page, Flow Diagrams, etc).

If you really need to get fancy, you could also add custom actions to those internal clicks to capture events, or additional correlations on the action, but I would investigate other options first.

You might even get away with just Activity Map data, with properly coded regions (the out of the box isn't very good), you can get a lot of insights right there.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I should add, that even with "Visit Level Expiries" on your eVars, each eVar has an Instance metric associated to it... this is when the eVar is explicitly set (and not just carrying forward the previous value)

Example Visit:

• Page A
• Click on Link (internal campaign X)
• Page B
  • eVar1 is set to "X"
  • Instance of eVar1 is incremented
• Page C
  • eVar1 maintains value "X"
  • Instance of eVar1 is not incremented
• Page D
  • eVar1 maintains value "X"
  • Instance of eVar1 is not incremented

		Page Views	Instance of eVar1
eVar1		3	1
	X	3	1

[Krishna_Musku]

So you want to track some links on the AEM pages right? I would say the easiest and quickest way to do is making that link as 'Priority Link' in that AEM component.

[JonathanBr1]

How do you make a Priority Link? If I have an internal hyperlink within an AEM campaign page how do I make that trackable to see how many people are clicking from my campaign page to another page on my website from the hyperlink on my campaign page?

[Krishna_Musku]

You can make that 'Priority Link' when authoring the page or that specific link. Once you made that link priority, '.cmstrack' will be added to the metric id. And you can see the data in the Link Name or eVar which you specified for Custom Link.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

This sounds like it's making a lot of assumptions about how their front end is coded... When we were using AEM, we used React on the front end... I can guarantee that in our sites, this wouldn't have worked... It also sounds like it relies on the "AEM <> Adobe Analytics" automatic tracking, which not everyone uses.

Also, from the sounds of it, this method would require an actual click tracking (action) to occur... depending on the usage of this page, that could result in a high number of additional server calls, which may not be the desired implementation.

@JonathanBr1 you should check into if your front end supports this, and if this is the way you want to proceed with tracking. 

I am not saying that you can't go this way, but you should investigate if your current site will even work with these settings, and if this is the behaviour you want.

Given this is a campaign page, if you want to tie you conversions back to these campaigns, using a more standardized internal campaign both keeps your server calls down, and provides the attribution for the visit.

There are always multiple ways to do things, and I am sure this solution works well for @Krishna_Musku, but I am worried that this may not work out-of-the-box.

[Krishna_Musku]

Yes, the internal campaign tracking is one of the simple way. But with using of AEM, i thought priority tracking is the easiest way to track. Also, It won’t work for every scenario, to track conversions and keep server calls down ‘Priority Tracking’ is not the best way. Priority Tracking is specific for low-traffic pages and for links with less clicks.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I hear you, I am just worried that this relies specifically on functionality that may or may not be available on the target website...

Using an internal campaign can be used on any site, using any tech stack... it also comes with the added bonus of not creating new server calls, and providing attribution through to the conversion events.

[Krishna_Musku]

Yes, this functionality is not available by default. It should be configured in AEM and mapped to Adobe Analytics. Ours is configured based on our needs. As i mentioned, this would be ideal for low traffic pages. I agree with the internal campaign especially, by not creating new server calls.