How clicks in emails are counted
Where the click numbers of campaigns and workflow emails come from, why a visit to your page can count as a click, and when it does not.
Click numbers in campaign reports and on workflow email steps come from two sources: the click tracking of the email provider and, as a backup, visits to your own pages from a link in the email. This article explains both and when a click is not counted.
Click tracking by the email provider
When Measure opens and clicks is on (in the Measurement section of a campaign's Send step, or the same switch on a workflow's Send email step), every link in the email first passes through the email provider's click counter and then opens the page you linked. Each pass is a click.
Recipients who opted out of measurement on the unsubscribe page get clean links and are never counted.
Visits to your pages count when the counter was skipped
Some privacy tools, link-cleaning extensions and mobile mail apps open the target page directly and skip the click counter. Without a backup, these recipients would read as "did not click" even though they came to your page.
So a link in a measured email that leads to one of your own pages also carries a short code for that recipient. When the recipient opens your page from the email and the provider saw no click, the visit counts as their click. It shows up in the numbers a few minutes after the visit.
The backup works only when all of these are true:
| Condition | Details |
|---|---|
| Measurement is on for the email | Measure opens and clicks on the campaign or the workflow step, and the recipient did not opt out. |
| The link leads to your own page | Your pages hosted on Zanfia and your connected domains. Links to other sites (YouTube, an external shop, your own site hosted elsewhere) are not covered. |
| The visitor accepted analytics cookies | The visitor clicked yes for analytics in the cookie banner on your page. A banner left unanswered counts as no, and the visit is not counted. |
A visit is counted once per recipient: a click seen by the provider and a visit from the same email are one click, and further visits add nothing.
Where you see these clicks
- Campaign report. In Statistics, once such visits were counted, the Links table has an extra row, Page visits (no click tracked), so the table adds up to the click totals. This row has no Who clicked list and no last-click time, because the visit is not tied to one particular link. Under the engagement numbers a note says "Clicks also include visits from this e-mail to your pages when a blocker skipped the click counter."
- Workflow email steps. In the workflow builder, hover over an email step: the click numbers include these visits, with the same note under the numbers.
Good to know
A click counted from a page visit is a statistic only: it does not run link actions (tags or workflows set on a link), because the page the recipient landed on is not necessarily the link they tapped.
UTM tags in workflow emails
Links in workflow emails get the same automatic UTM tags as campaign links, so a visit from a workflow email is not counted as "direct" traffic. With the default values, utm_campaign holds the workflow's name. The tags follow your Links in emails (UTM) settings on the Emails tab of your site settings (/site/emails). Links that already carry their own utm_ tags stay as you wrote them. More in UTM tracking.
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