Tracking clicks on embedded view on website

Alex_Wells · ‎Jan 14, 2022

We have a funding database that we update regularly for our charity members. On our website is an embedded gallery view that shows all the current opportunities, which incluldes links to the funders external websites - as shown here: Find funding | Community Southwark

For our monitoring and record keeping I’d like to know how many users take action to visit those funders - is there any way of tracking this using airtable, or should I be looking at something like bit.ly for individual link tracking?

Thanks in advance,

Alex

ScottWorld · ‎Jan 14, 2022

Welcome to the community, @Alex_Wells!

Bit.ly is a good way to do it.

Very similarly, another way to do it is the way that a few of my clients are doing it. They use a button field (instead of a URL field). The button field triggers a webhook in Integromat which then redirects them to the proper website. Meanwhile, Integromat does all sorts of fancy stuff on their behalf, such as keeping track of number of clicks in Airtable, sending out automated emails, and much more:

See Solution in Thread

ScottWorld · ‎Jan 14, 2022

Welcome to the community, @Alex_Wells!

Bit.ly is a good way to do it.

Very similarly, another way to do it is the way that a few of my clients are doing it. They use a button field (instead of a URL field). The button field triggers a webhook in Integromat which then redirects them to the proper website. Meanwhile, Integromat does all sorts of fancy stuff on their behalf, such as keeping track of number of clicks in Airtable, sending out automated emails, and much more:

Alex_Wells · ‎Jan 17, 2022

Thanks very much for the reply Scott - Integromat looks like a neat solution and will definitely check that out.

ScottWorld · ‎Jan 17, 2022

@Alex_Wells

You’re welcome! :slightly_smiling_face:

See my screenshot below for one simple way to build out this redirect in Integromat. (This is before you start adding on other fancy tricks to the end of this scenario to track the clicked links.)

To explain a little bit:

In Integromat, you’ll need to use both the webhook and the webhook response modules. The webhook module will be waiting for the clicked link, and the webhook response module will redirect people to the proper page. More details here:

For your clicked link webhook URL that is part of your button in Airtable, you’ll want to add some parameter to your webhook URL. To hide the redirect URL from the user, you will probably just want to send the Airtable record ID to Integromat as a parameter in your webhook URL. Then, you can retrieve the real redirect URL (or any other fields that you want to retrieve) from the Airtable record using the Airtable “Get A Record” module:

This is an advanced trick that not too many people know about, but within Integromat’s “Settings” (the gear button at the bottom of the scenario), be sure to turn on the “Auto Commit” option. This enables your webhook response (i.e. the redirect) to happen immediately for the user. Otherwise, the webhook response will wait until your entire Integromat scenario is finished running before it redirects.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant & Integromat Expert+ Partner to help you create this, please feel free to contact me through my website:

Alex_Wells · ‎Jan 18, 2022

Thanks very much for taking the time to talk this through Scott, looks interesting. At the moment it is a little step beyond our organisation’s IT capacity, so we’re going to use bit.ly links to track this for the time being, but hopefully we’ll be able to build on this and use these suggestions in future!

ScottWorld · ‎Jan 18, 2022

You’re welcome! If you need a consultant in the future, feel free to reach out to me through my website.