Who clicked the link in my email?
Once recording is on and some of your readers have agreed to it, a sent campaign shows you which of its links people pressed, and you can ask Bernard who they were.
The prompt
“Show me the results for [campaign] on [my site], then tell me who clicked the [link] in it.”
Signed in, Get my prompt fills in your site for you. Otherwise press Copy and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard once: Use your own AI (opens in a new tab).
What the table shows
Under the campaign, below the results line, a short table:
| Link | Goes to | Clicked by |
|---|---|---|
| link:book-a-class | https://yoursite.com/classes | 19 |
| link:read-the-post | https://yoursite.com/blog/glazing | 7 |
- Link is the name bernard gave that link when it built the message.
- Goes to is the page the reader lands on. The redirect is invisible to them.
- Clicked by is how many people pressed it, not how many presses there were.
Every link in the formatted message gets its own row, so a button and a text link pointing at the same page are counted separately. That is generally the useful answer: it tells you which one people reached for.
Getting the names
The table is counts. For the people, ask Bernard:
Who clicked the booking link in my autumn workshop campaign?
He reads back the readers themselves, fifty at a time, sorted by email address: name, address, when they last opened something, when they last clicked, and how many of each. Name the link and he narrows to that one link; name the campaign and he narrows to that campaign; ask for neither and you get everybody who has opened or clicked lately.
Say how far back you mean. Unless you say otherwise Bernard looks at the last month, so a campaign you sent in the spring needs “in the last year” saying out loud or the answer comes back empty. He tells you which window he actually used, and a year is as far back as the records go.
It is humans only. People whose only opens were fetched by a mail app are left out of the list and out of the total, and counted separately so you can see there were some. You can ask for them to be included, and Bernard will say that he has.
What the list is not
It is not an audience. This is something to read, not a group you can send to. Picking a campaign’s recipients by who opened or clicked is a later step and does not exist today. If you ask for it, Bernard will tell you so plainly rather than quietly building a list and sending to it. Today you choose recipients the way you always have
It is not everybody. Only the people who agreed to opens and clicks being recorded can ever appear on it. The sentence above the table always leads with how many of the campaign’s recipients had agreed, exactly so neither the table nor the list is mistaken for a share of your whole list. If nobody in that campaign had agreed, there is no table and a sentence says why.
Absence is not a verdict. Somebody missing from the list may simply never have agreed, or may use a mail app that fetches nothing. Bernard will not turn that into “she did not open it”, and neither should you.
Asking Bernard instead
Show me the results for the autumn workshop campaign, including which links people clicked.
Bernard reads the same figures the page shows and reads them out in the same words, so the two can never disagree. It is a read: nothing changes, and nothing is sent.
Where it fits
Can I see who opened my email? is the whole picture, including how somebody agrees and why some opens are set aside. Has this person opened anything I sent? is the same question asked about one person rather than one campaign. What happened after I sent my email campaign? is the rest of the results: delivered, retired, unsubscribed, complaints, and why anything did not arrive. How do people agree to opens and clicks being recorded? is what you can do to raise the number of people who agreed.
Seeing the visits as well
Links to your own website also carry a small label saying which email and which link they came from, so your website analytics can count the visits each email brought: Can I see which email sent people to my website?.
Questions people ask
- Where is the link table?
- Under a sent campaign in Your customers, Email campaigns, below the results line. It lists each link in the message, where it goes and how many people pressed it. Reading it changes nothing and needs no approval.
- Can I get the names of the people who clicked?
- Yes. Ask Bernard who clicked, naming the campaign and the link, and he reads back the people themselves: name, address, when they last opened and last clicked. Only the people who agreed to opens and clicks being recorded are ever on it.
- Can I then email only those people?
- Not yet. The list is something to read, not an audience you can send to. Choosing a campaign’s recipients by who opened or clicked is a later step and does not exist today, so Bernard will say so rather than building you a list to send to.
- Why does one link show fewer clicks than I expected?
- The table counts only the people who agreed to be counted, so it is never a share of your whole audience. It also counts people rather than presses, so somebody who pressed the same link four times is one.
- The message had two links to the same page. Why are they separate rows?
- Each link in the message is counted where it sits, so a button and a text link to the same page are two rows. That is usually what you want, because it tells you which one people actually used.
- Are clicks from security scanners in there?
- Bernard flags presses that look like a security system checking the message rather than a person reading it, and keeps them out of the headline count. It never deletes them.
- Links in the plain-text version are not counted. Why?
- Only the links in the formatted version of the message are recorded. A click on a plain-text link is almost always a scanner rather than a reader, so counting them would make your numbers worse, not better.