Your emails will likely contain links that navigate to your website or mobile app. To track if the link was clicked, your Email Service Provider will change the URL structure to make it trackable and OneSignal can hook into that click event for analytics.

By default, all emails sent from OneSignal will have link tracking enabled, causing the URL structure to change.

You can disable link tracking by unchecking the Track link clicks option in the dashboard email form. For Emails sent through our API set disable_email_click_tracking to true in your API requests.

If you disable link tracking:

• OneSignal cannot track link clicks and will show N/A in the Email Message Reports Click-Through Rate.
• All URLs in the email will not be tracked. There is not an option to disable link tracking for only specific links.

Deep Linking

Currently, if you setup deep links, you must disable email link tracking if you want that link to open your app directly.

Deep-linking generally refers to opening your mobile app and navigating to a specific page. The most commonly used methods provided by Apple and Google to deep link into iOS and Android mobile apps is with iOS Universal links and Android App Links. The tricky thing about deep linking from email is you don't know if the user is on an iPhone/iPad or Android device. iOS Universal Links only work on iPhones/iPads with Safari as the default browser and Android App Links only work on Android devices.

Further, in order for click events to be tracked, they need to open in a browser which triggers the webhook to track the click event for that email. So the following scenarios can happen:

1. iOS Universal Link, iOS Device, Browser is Safari, Enable Click Tracking => the link will open to Safari (triggers the click event), asks if you want to open the app, then direct you to the deep-linked page.
2. iOS Universal Link, iOS Device, Browser is Safari, Disable Click Tracking => the link will open to the deep-linked page directly but no click event tracking.
3. iOS Universal Link, iOS Device, Browser is not Safari, Enable or Disable Click Tracking => the link will open the browser and go to the app store.
4. iOS Universal Link, Android Device, Enable or Disable Click Tracking => the link will open the browser and go to the app store.
5. Android App Link, iOS Device, Browser is Safari, Enable or Disable Click Tracking => the link will open the browser and go to the app store.
6. Android App Link, Android Device, Enable Click Tracking => the link will open the browser (triggers the click event), ask if you want to open the app, then direct you to the deep-linked page.
7. Android App Link, Android Device, Disable Click Tracking => the link will open to the deep-linked page directly but no click event tracking.

The only solution to fix the iOS Universal Link or Android App Link being opened on the wrong device or browser is to use a tool like Branch.io, Appsflyer OneLink, or some other link routing system. However, this will still require you to disable link tracking if you want to open the app directly.

Unique Link Tracking

To accomplish unique link tracking you can add UTM's directly to your emails. This will allow you to identify which links were clicked in an email.