Now that we know how to track basic message open statistics, we may want to know who opens our messages and actually clicks on the links in the message.
Unlike user tracking, click tracking is enabled / disabled globally in the config
file and will work with text or HTML e-mails. phpList performs click tracking by rewriting every URL in your message, effectively placing itself "in between" the user and the final destination.
This means that if you add a link to www.mywonderfulwidgets.com
to your e-mail, it would normally look like this in the e-mail source:
<a href="http://www.mywonderfulwidgets.com">widget</a>
When click tracking is enabled, the link will be rewritten like this:
<a href="url-to-your-phplist-install.com/lt.php?id=fk0ETwdVGlcH" >widget</a>
phpList records a unique ID (see the rewritten link) for each user and link, meaning that it's able to redirect the rewritten link to the original link, as well as record which user clicked on the link...