Turning off link tracking and image downloading
Posted by Ben Richardson on August 10, 2006
When you import your content into Campaign Monitor, we automatically download all your images and convert all your links so they can be tracked through the reports. Works well. Everyones happy.
But, what if on the odd chance you didn't want us to do that? What if you've got a dynamically created image that you want to be different for each recipient (perhaps using data you pass in through a custom field).
Well we've just added a couple of simple attributes you can add to your code that let us know to leave certain bits alone. What do they look like? All you need to do is add either the cm_dontimportimage or cm_dontconvertlink attribute to your image or link tags. As a quick example, here's the image tag in action:
Turning off image importing
<img src="http://www.myserver.com/filename.jpg" width="20" height="20" alt="alt text here" cm_dontimportimage>
Turning off link tracking
<a href="http://www.myserver.com" cm_dontconvertlink>this is a link</a>
Although we don't do any conversion when we detect these values, we do remove the cm_dontimportimage and cm_dontconvertlink values when we actually send your campaign.
4 comments so far
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Damien
wrote on August 10, 2006 7:51 PM
Excellent - have yet to try it but the cm_dontconvertlink option should solve my problem of linking to one newsletter on your system from another newsletter - I've had to put a re-direct page on the server as up to now the system was re-writing its own dynamic URL's into something not only ugly but which didnt work. I'll let you know how I get on with this.
Matt Leighton
wrote on August 10, 2006 9:18 PM
Excellent feature - once again, thank you and well done!
Cole Whitelaw
wrote on August 11, 2006 12:30 AM
you've just clicked something into place in my head. Passing variables into IMG tags to personalise creative was something I hadn't thought of. Thanks!
Dave Greiner
wrote on August 11, 2006 8:26 AM
Cole, it's definitely a cool little trick that can add a further degree of personalization to your emails. We plan on writing a quick how-to on dynamic images here real soon.
Got anything to add?