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CNAME setup
Chris Traczyk avatar
Written by Chris Traczyk
Updated over a week ago

In this article you can learn more about CNAME and how to set it up properly in order to improve your deliverability:

What is CNAME?

CNAME is a type of record in the Domain Name System (DNS), that specifies that one domain name is an alias of another domain name.

When you use our native click and open tracking, our system automatically changes your links a bit to see the prospect’s activity. As we don’t have direct access to your DNS records, these links by default are not associated with your domain. The CNAME record will allow you to customize them and is crucial if you want to keep your email deliverability perfect.

The feature will allow you to set up a custom domain that will be used in all links so that they look more like this: “track.yourdomain.com/xxxx”. Thanks to the feature, you’ll be able to customize your emails a bit more and increase deliverability.

Setting CNAME record on your domain

Technical talk aside, what you need to do is to simply create a new record in your domain's DNS settings (you can ask your IT administrator for help).

Just create a new DNS record using the following data:
Record type: CNAME
Record name/host: track

Record value: trackgb.com

TTL (Time to live): 7200

The final record should look like this (the names of the columns depend on the domain provider you use):

Record type

Label/Host field

Time To Live (TTL)

Destination/Target field/Points to

CNAME

track

7200

Where:

  • CNAME is the DNS record type,

  • track is the host (the prefix of your subdomain, which will ultimately look like this: track.yourdomain.com)

  • trackgb.com is our tracking domain to which your subdomain should point,

  • 7200 is Time To Live.

Example: Let's say your domain name is abcd.com. The final setup would be:

Record type

Label/Host field

Time To Live (TTL)

Destination/Target field/Points to

CNAME

track.abcd.com

7200

Please note that in most of the DNS hosting providers' settings, your domain is added automatically, hence you just need to put "track" in the label/host field.

Which prefix do we recommend?
It’s up to you and can vary on a case by case basis (because you may already be using a subdomain we suggest), but prefixes we recommend are "track", "images", "img", "resources", "gb".

NOTE: If you're using GoDaddy, in the Host field you should just put "track".

Here’s how you can set up a CNAME record for most popular providers:

Adding CNAME record in Growbots

Once you create a customized CNAME record and configure this in your domain’s DNS records, you’ll need to go to Settings -> Organization and type the CNAME record so we can verify and connect it to Growbots.

The system will automatically check if the CNAME is set up correctly and show the confirmation status. If something went wrong, contact our support team and they’ll investigate the issue. This setting works for the entire organization.

CNAME2.png

NOTE: Bear in mind that connecting your CNAME record to Growbots may take up to 24 hours.

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