Hi All. Quick question about tracking clicks from an email to conversion. We have a requirement to track click throughs of an email (sent from our CF based platform) to an action (e.g. registering for an event or making a donation). We have a basic tracker of email opens and link clicks (ie did someone click the link in the email). But, we now need to track them further than the initial email link click to know if they then registered for the event that the link was advertising. We're thinking through how that might be done (cookies? client variables? session variables?). Anyone do that before? I guess the key question is what is the best way to determine whether the action was taken (e.g. registration) several page views after the initial link click in the email. Anyone do this before?

We leverage Google Analytics for a lot of that sort of stuff and just make sure we have JS at the appropriate places that notifies GA of certain events -- and then it tracks the actual events-across-sessions.

@seancorfield Many thanks. We should look into doing it on GA. That's a good idea. For our clients using the platform, they may not be that sophisticated (to have a GA account and know how to use it). So I guess maybe we could help them get a GA account and then maybe pull the key metrics into our platform for easier viewing. But, I was thinking about doing this right in our back end, at least for simple scenarios. Why do you think session variables are superior to cookies or client variables. I think of them all as persistent variables.

If you want to track behavior across multiple sessions, use an encrypted cookie. If you are just looking to track behavior across a single session, you're not requiring anything be stored on the client (other than session ID). GA uses cookies across multiple sessions so you can track returning customer behavior. Depends what you need.

@seancorfield Thanks for the follow up. I guess I would lean towards the more robust solution (ie encrypted cookies) unless the time / resource needs are much bigger for that approach.