When you use our click and open tracking, we automatically change your links a bit to monitor recipients actions. This is a standard way of tracking activity and our default link looks something like this “123.123.123.123.bc.googleusercontent.com/11231231231232132131232132”, which is not the most friendly looking link.
To help you customize all data added to your email content, we created a feature, that allows you to set up a custom domain which will be used in all links, so that links look more like this: “track.growbots.com/12312312321323”. Thanks to the feature, you’ll be able to customize your emails a bit more, distinguish yourself from other clients that use Growbots and naturally increase deliverability. All you need to do is to add a CNAME record in your domain’s DNS settings that will forward traffic from the subdomain specified by you to our tracking service.
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 every domain you can define a subdomain and the subdomain is the part before the domain itself, for example: “subdomain.example.com”. It enables to reroute traffic trying to reach this address somewhere else. In this case, we want to reroute this traffic to our own servers.
How to set up the custom domain
First of all, you need to add a CNAME record which will specify which domain should be visible in your links and point to our tracking domain:
subdomain.example.com CNAME trackgb.com. 7200
where:
- subdomain.example.com is the domain displayed in links,
- trackgb.com is our tracking domain to which your subdomain should point,
- 7200 is Time To Live.
You’ll probably need some help from your IT administrator who has the access to your domain settings.
Here’s how you can set up CNAME record for most popular providers:
GoDaddy NOTE: GoDaddy treats CNAMEs and subdomains as 2 separate things. If you use GoDaddy, please use this article to set up CNAME correctly.
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".
How to enable CNAME record
Once you create 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.
