How Link Tracking Kills Your Deliverability (And What to Do Instead)
Link tracking is one of the most common deliverability killers in cold email. Understanding why — and what alternatives exist — can dramatically improve your inbox placement.
Link tracking is one of the most common deliverability killers in cold email. Understanding why — and what alternatives exist — can dramatically improve your inbox placement.
How link tracking works
When you enable click tracking in your cold email tool, it replaces every link in your email with a redirect URL. Instead of the prospect clicking on "yourcompany.com," they click on a tracking domain URL that records the click and then redirects to the original URL.
Why this hurts deliverability
The tracking URLs in your emails come from a shared tracking domain. If other users of the same cold email tool are abusing that domain (sending spam, phishing), the shared tracking domain gets flagged. Now every email that includes a link from that domain — including yours — triggers spam filters. Even with a custom tracking domain, the redirect behavior itself is suspicious to email providers. Redirects are a common technique used in phishing attacks, so filters are primed to flag them. Additionally, click tracking adds hidden HTML to your email. What looks like plain text in your editor is actually HTML with redirect links, which changes how spam filters evaluate your content.
The deliverability impact
Many cold emailers have reported immediate improvements in inbox placement after disabling click tracking. The difference can be dramatic — going from 40% inbox placement to 80%+ simply by removing tracking links.
What to do instead
Disable click tracking entirely. If you need to include a link, use a raw URL to your own domain. Do not track clicks on it. Your cold email tool will still track replies (which is the metric that actually matters), and you can monitor engagement through reply content rather than click data. If knowing click data is important for your workflow, test with a custom tracking domain that you control and monitor its reputation carefully. But for maximum deliverability, no tracking is the best approach.
The broader lesson
Every additional element you add to a cold email — tracking links, tracking pixels, images, HTML formatting — increases the chance of spam filtering. The simplest, most stripped-down email has the best deliverability. Test your deliverability before and after removing tracking using the deliverability checker.
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