<name>.us<number>.list-manage2.com

Discussion in 'Questions & Comments' started by Pirocco, Sep 2, 2014.

  1. Pirocco

    Pirocco Well-Known Member

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    Over time I noticed that more and more website news publications passed as email, ceased to put in the email direct links to articles on their site, instead everything redirects along for ex. <edited>.us5.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=<edited>&id=<edited>
    Which purpose does this serve?
     
  2. goldpelican

    goldpelican Administrator Staff Member

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    Campaign tracking. So you know if a sale/click/visit originates from an email campaign, banner campaign, Google search etc. Analytics allow companies to focus their marketing efforts where it pays off the most.
     
  3. Pirocco

    Pirocco Well-Known Member

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    What doesn't appear to make sense is this:
    1) I sign in on a newsletter.
    2) They send me news with all links passing the same data string to us<number>.list-manage2.com

    That same data string of 2) implies that they have no way to differentiate between the different items in the newsletter.
    So they have nothing to focus on. All they know is that the reader clicked on one or more of the items. They have no idea which.
    What did they already know: that I signed in on the newsletter, and that I'm thus interested.
    What do they know more with that tracking? Nothing.

    My particular question today, had a specific reason. I subscribed to local government publications somewhile ago, and they just started doing this too. The email is basically just a short title list of new articles / studies / etc, mostly pdfs to download. Yet they pass u and id strings to some central tracking place, that delivers nothing more than a direct link would have delivered.
    The sole remaining reason is that that central (many sites use it) tracking place serves another party, and I'm not sure if I like that.


    btw, I never use those links. I just visit the site directly, it's a tad more work but bookmarks work well enough.
    Some try to push you to use the email links, by making searching / navigating on their site less easy.
    At some point I just dig the site altogether.
    I don't want to be in some database with everything they found along that redirecting (google analytics, clouds, ...). Just read the news, it's full of mess caused by such 'personal information collecting', that still hangs around there after years, apparently syncing local deletion with cloud deletion doesn't suit their purposes. :p
     

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