Understanding link tables

The Link Table option allows you to track recipient clicks for a specified campaign.

To create a link table:

  • Click Actions on the side navigation bar, and select Create Link Table. (Not seeing this choice? Refer to the Side navigation bar changes topic.)

Learn more about the different methods below.

Link Table Fields

Typically, link tables include the following fields.

  • Symbolic names of links (must be text fields).
  • Actual URL for each link.
  • Optional parameters to be passed to an external tracking process (if your account is set up with this feature).
  • Optional link category (if link categories have been defined for your account).

Note the following:

  • First two fields are required.
  • Subsequent fields are optional.
  • Symbolic name and the URL must be unique.

    Important: Duplicate names/URLs cause the misdirection of hyperlinks. With duplicates, only top link is used.

Opening a link in a mobile app

Important: This option applies only for email campaigns that have link tracking enabled.

You can redirect recipients to a mobile app when they click a link on their Android or iOS mobile devices.

The specified app will open if it is installed on the recipient's device. If the app is not installed, or if the app URL is not specified, the recipient will be redirected to the link URL.

You specify the URL of the mobile app in the following fields:

  • IOS link URL: For iOS devices
  • Android link URL: For Android devices

Learn more about mobile app links and how to obtain them.

Creating Link Tables

There are several types of link table creation methods.

Create by:

  • Extracting data from existing documents
  • Generating from scratch, and populating fields manually.
  • Uploading a delimited text file.
  • Creating link table data from existing supplemental data sources.

Creating Link Tables from Existing Documents

With this method you can build a link table from one or more existing HTML and/or plain-text documents. The link table is populated with the URLs. The corresponding text descriptions making up the hypertext links found in the documents becomes the name.

Extracting from Documents Example

Responsys (<a href="http://www.responsys.com" target="_blank">Responsys</a>)

  • Name – textlink_Responsys.

    Note: When image is used as the hyperlink (such as responsyslogo.gif): Name – imagelink_Responsyslogo.

  • URL – www.responsys.com.

Creating Link Tables from Scratch

Example 1 – One Campaign Builder

As the campaign builder, you are responsible for both managing the content as well as the data.

You can use the Data Source Wizard to modify the link table as you require. Or you can download the link table to a delimited-text file, and use Microsoft Excel for more advanced text manipulation.

Example 2 – Multiple Campaign Builders

You and one or more Oracle Responsys users are responsible for managing the content and the data as follows.

  • Web Development Team – Builds landing page and provides link information.
  • Campaign Creator – Responsible for campaign content. With links already known (via web developers) prior to creating the campaign document, the link table is pre-built and imported into Oracle Responsys.
  • Campaign Developer – With the link table created, this developer may choose to take advantage of Oracle Responsys Built-in Functions (such as clickthrough(), urlencode(), etc.) to embed links into the document without having to retype actual links.

Learn more

link tables