Anatomy of an URL.
Q: Every wonder how a company determines the effectiveness of it's email? I mean, how do you determine if the receiver clicked on the URL to view the web page advertised. Now, consider if you are a third party channel and do not manage the web server, it becomes more difficult to determine the effectiveness of the mailing. Follow my drift?
A: Its really not difficult to resolve if you are willing to commit resources, like a computer and a programmer. Messagemedia has several ways to do this, I'll use the message I received about Adobe to explain.
This is the URL I received from Messagemedia on Adobe:
adobe.0mm.com
I know it came from Messagemedia because "0mm.com" (that's zero double M dot com) is a generic domain name owned by Messagemedia.
Messagemedia apparently has a dedicated server called "adobe" (also in the address) to handle this traffic.
The directories that follow the 0mm.com address suggests this is unix server and the "cgi" tells me if I click on the URL, the server is ready to do something on the fly, but I don't know what.
The "?" is an argument and everything right of "?" has nothing to do with the web page but has special meaning to the Adobe.0mm.com server. Looking at the argument, it appears to have two parts. The first part, probably indicates the web page I am to be sent to, and the second part probably IDs me at least to my email address.
In short, when I click on the URL, I first go to the Messagemedia server which logs the fact that I received the email, opened it, and clicked on the URL, then it sends me on the Adobe web sever. And it does this all on the fly.
It happens so fast, the novice doesn't know his vote has been counted. And there may be a cookie involved to further track me at the Adobe web site, in particular if I BOT anything.
The speed at which all this happens suggests both Messagemedia and Adobe both have a lot of bandwidth and high powered servers to go with it.
In short, there's a lot you can read in an URL, if you know what to look for. |
