Why You Can’t Trust Sprinklr Link Clicks

Sprinklr link tracking grossly overestimates the click-through traffic for links shared through the platform. Learn why!

Within reporting for the Sprinklr Publishing and Engagement modules you will find 8 general link tracking “Metrics”. This doesn’t even include the platform-specific link clicks like “Twitter URL Clicks”. These metrics will allow you to track the user clicks on links that your team shares on social media.  All of these metrics vary in slightly different ways, except the one way that matters the most.

Sprinklr calculates clicks based on link hashes, with no regard for the individual post. When a link is posted, it is tagged with a unique identifier, and this is permanent within the platform. So when the same link is used in multiple posts, there is no way for Sprinklr to know which post it is based off. Because of this, clicks are attributed to the first post, and compound over time.

Note: This is true even when you are auto-tagging links with web analytics, which would theoretically create a unique url each time.

While this might lead to some issues for teams publishing marketing and PR content, it is a major issue for Care groups. This is because care teams tend to share the same links repeatedly. If you think about the 80/20 rule, the majority of your incoming support tickets are going to relate to a few recurring items. These will be thinks like: Reset my password, what deals do you currently have, my billing is wrong, and so on.

Let me demonstrate this with one of the most basic link types that our teams share. When working with customers on Account related issues, we move them from the Twitter public space to the Twitter DM space. THis is done via a direct link to the associated handle’s DM. 

In one month we shared our direct link to Twitter DM 4,867 times. When you look at the example report below you see this same link listed over and over again with over 25k clicks. While anyone would all be ecstatic to have this many clicks on a sales link shared organically in Twitter, we know that this is an absurd value for a Care link. This overstates the click values by millions because we share this link hundreds of time a day, and it is constantly adding up the number of clicks that this link receives.

Side Note: For reasons we still don’t understand, our monthly report has spit out 603 unique click counts, which I’ve been pushing back on Sprinklr about. Based on their explanation I should have 4,867 duplications of the same number since the link hash remains constant.

links

Synopsis:

Problem: If you are sharing links with your customers through Sprinklr, and then using Sprinklr to track the click rates, your numbers are most likely exaggerated. The more often you are sharing a specific url, the more painful the impact becomes.

Partial Resolution: Your best bet is to always apply web analytics tagging to every link that you share. You can then rely on your web analytics for an accurate count of traffic coming in to your channel. To learn more about how to do this view my blog post here. Note, this will only work for links to domains you own. At the end of the day, links like the direct to DM link in the example can’t be tracked by your web analytics.

If you have any questions on this topic feel free to drop them in the comments section!

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