Read your click map
The Link Performance tab draws your clicks on the email itself. Read the heatmap, switch to numbered badges, use the ranked list, and know what the flags mean.
A list of links and their click counts tells you what people clicked. It does not tell you where in the email they were looking. The click map answers the second question by drawing your clicks on the email you actually sent.
This guide is about that picture: the two ways Mailsoftly draws it, the ranked list beside it, and the handful of flags that explain a number that looks wrong.
Open Link Performance
Open a sent campaign. Above the email sits a tab row, and on a campaign that qualifies there is a fourth tab called Link Performance, after Campaign Details, Campaign Stats and Reports.
Three figures sit at the top of the card and stay put whichever view you are in: Links, total clicks and unique clickers. They are raw counts, measured on the same basis as Campaign Stats rather than filtered down, so the two tabs no longer tell you different things about the same send.
The tab is not on every campaign. It needs two things: the feature switched on for your account, which our support team does, and a campaign sent after link tracking went live with at least one trackable link in it. Open an older campaign or one with no links and Mailsoftly sends you back to Campaign Stats with a line saying Link Performance isn’t available for this campaign.
Clicks on the Mailsoftly badge under your footer never reach any of these numbers. They are dropped before anything is counted, so Links, total clicks and unique clickers describe your content and nothing else. A campaign that deliberately links to a page on our site is counted normally.
Open Link Performance in Mailsoftly
Read the heatmap
The card opens on the Heatmap, a colour gradient laid over your campaign. Warm means busy: the ramp runs from blue for few clicks, through green and yellow, to red for the most clicked areas of the email. The key sits on the left of the toolbar and says the same thing in one line when you hover it.
Read it the way you would read a photograph rather than a table. What you are looking for is where the heat is, not how much of it there is: a hero button glowing red and a wall of text below it staying blue tells you the top of the email did the work. Two warm patches far apart tell you people scrolled.
The picture is the email your recipients received, rendered as it was sent, so the layout you are reading is the layout they read.
Switch to badges for the numbers
The switcher on the right of the toolbar has three stops. The first one, Badges, keeps the same email and swaps the gradient for a numbered badge on every tracked link. Each badge carries that link’s rank, its clicks and its share of the campaign, so you can put a figure on what the heatmap only suggested.
The badges are green, in five shades from pale to deep, and the key beside them explains the bands: very few clicks, few clicks, an average number of clicks, many clicks, and the most clicked links. Green rather than red is deliberate. A heavily clicked link is the best thing that can happen to a campaign, and red would read as an error.
Beside the picture, in both modes, is Links by clicks: the same links ranked, biggest first. Select a row and its badge is highlighted on the email, which is the fastest way to find where a link actually sits in a long newsletter. Two flags can appear on a row.
- 2 places, or any other count, means that address is written more than once in the email. Click tracking works by address, not by position, so all of those copies share one number and every badge shows the same figure. A logo that links home and a footer link that goes to the same page are one row, not two.
- Not in the email means the address was clicked but is no longer in the body, so it has no badge to point at. That happens when the campaign was edited after it went out.
Use the list when you need names
The third stop, List, puts the email away and gives you the ranked list on its own, with the two controls that only exist there: the All clicks and Unique people toggle, and the Sort control with Most clicked, Least clicked, Most unique and By link name.
That toggle is worth understanding. All clicks counts every click, so one enthusiastic reader who pressed the same button five times counts five times. Unique people counts each person once. When the two numbers are far apart on one link, you are looking at a handful of people clicking repeatedly, not a broad response.
Expand any row and you get the contacts behind it. This is the view you want when the question has a name in it, as in "did anyone from that account read the pricing link".
Go full screen, and keep the view you picked
The button in the corner of the picture takes the whole card full screen, the ranked list included, which is what you want on a long email or in front of an audience. Press Escape to come back. Some browsers refuse to hand a page the full screen; when that happens Mailsoftly covers the window instead, and it behaves the same way.
Mailsoftly also remembers which picture you were on by writing it into the address bar, so refreshing the page or sending the link to a colleague reopens on the same view rather than resetting to the default.
Use the two views for the two different questions. The picture answers "where did attention go", and it is the one to open first. The list answers "which link, and how many", and it is where you go once the picture has told you where to look. Track your campaign results puts both of them back in the context of the whole send.
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