Email Performance Report - is it a Bug or a Feature?

Catrina Roallos 4

Hi friends — I did a quick search and didn't find anyone talking about this...


A client's email Campaign is reporting data that seems wrong or incomplete.


We sent an A/B test email on March 18 and one of the segments (sent to more than a thousand people) only reported nine click-throughs yet the donation form has had 16 transactions. There is no other way to arrive at this donation form, except through the email.


We thought that was weird, so today we sent a new A/B test in the same email Campaign to two people at four email addresses and both people opened, clicked, and donated from all four emails. The variant performance report shows 0 activity—no opens, no clicks, no actions.

Has anyone else noticed a recent blockage of email performance data? Is there a known issue that I am not aware of?


We need to be able to pick a winner form the March 18 A/B test based on user engagment (click-through rate), but we fear that our data is incomplete or inacurate.


Any tips would be appreciated.


Thanks! -c


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Catrina Roallos, Lead Web Developer

Pronouns: she / her / hers

Mal Warwick Donordigital

Colleen Gutierrez

Hi Catrina - I'd recommend opening up a ticket with Blackbaud Support to look into this.


Thanks,

Colleen

Meghan Christiansen 2

Hi Catrina,


I would definitely go to Support for this as it is very odd.


Let us know what happens with this issue (very curious!). I haven't noticed any issues on our end but haven't tested it like you have. I would be interested to know if there is an issue as we use these reports quite often.


Thanks,


Meghan

Jeremy Reynolds

If you've got much in the way of customizations in the email message, you also might want to check and make sure that the links work as expected (in a final/sent email message, not in preview or test message). Depending on how the message and/or template has been made, LO can sometimes drop a tag or fail to turn it into a trackable URL.

Robin Anderson

Hi Catrina!


One thing that can interfere with LO email tracking is source and/or subsource codes or other types of tracking appended to the URLs of any links in the emails, so definitely keep that in mind. Other than that, I think reaching out to Support is a good next step, as they can take a look at the client's site settings and determine if something is amiss.


I hope this helps - post back when you find out what happened or if you have additional questions.


Cheers,

Robin

Catrina Roallos 4

Hi Robin — We figured it out! it was caused by errant line breaks... I'm going to update my post w/ the solution.

Catrina Roallos 4

// ISSUE SOLVED //


Update: after lots of testing and troubleshooting, we finally figured out the problem:


Turns out, Convio doesn't recognize this as a link:

<a
  href="https://functioning-link.com">

...BECAUSE...the href attribute is on a new line.


I figured it out when I viewed source on a sent message and saw that a few of the links were converted, e.g., they became like "https://...convio.net/site/R?i=XXX", while the rest of the links remained unchanged. The difference was in the line break.


This explains how some people were able to donate to the landing page, but were not tracked.


The devs on my team use Visual Studio Code with add-ons that "prettify" code to make it human-readable. That means that oftentimes our links become formatted like above, with a line break after the tag's start.


I've asked my team not to run the prettifyer on the whole email anymore, which isn't great for our productivity, but Convio isn't smart enough to convert these into trackable links. ($@&^*=%#?!)


Hope this helps someone out there...just watch out for errant line breaks and your engagement rate might get a boost... -c

Robin Anderson

Thanks for sharing Catrina! That's super frustrating. I've seen something similar when there is an extra space before or after the URL - typically accidental from copying and pasting a link, but I've never seen this one before! I'm glad you were able to figure out!


Cheers,

Robin