What is CNAME?
It is a type of record in the Domain Name System (DNS), that specifies that one domain name is an alias of another domain name.
Why should you use that?
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.
How will it work?
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.
How to set it up?
In order to customize the tracking domain, we require that you update your DNS records. Let’s say you have a domain “example.com”. For your domain, you can define a subdomain. The subdomain is the part before the domain itself, for example: “subdomain.yourdomain.com”. It enables us to reroute traffic that’s trying to reach this address somewhere else. In this case, we want to reroute this traffic to our own servers, so we can track the clicks made by prospects.
First of all, you need to add a CNAME record in your DNS settings (you can ask your IT administrator for help) which will specify which domain should be visible in your links and point to our tracking domain. It should look like this:
track.yourdomain.com CNAME trackgb.com. 7200
Where:
- track.yourdomain.com is the domain displayed in links,
- trackgb.com is our tracking domain to which your subdomain should point,
- 7200 is Time To Live.
Which subdomain 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 subdomains we recommend are "track", "images", "img", "resources", "gb".
Here’s how you can set up a CNAME record for most popular providers:
Google
Office 365
1&1
Bluehost
Cloud Flare
Digital Ocean
DreamHost
Dynadot
GoDaddy
InMotion Hosting
Name.com
Namecheap
How to enable 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.
NOTE: Bear in mind that connecting your CNAME record to Growbots may take up to 24 hours.
