Tracking domain
The domain that tracked links and open pixels in your emails point to. A custom one on your own domain keeps link reputation separate from other senders.
What it means
To count clicks, a sending platform rewrites each link to go through its tracking domain, which records the click and redirects. By default that is the platform's own domain, shared with its other customers. SendGrid's link branding replaces sendgrid.net with your own domain for click-tracked links, opens and images, and explains that filters judge links by the reputation of their root domain.
M3AAWG recommends a consistent organisational domain throughout a message, including click-tracking links, and warns that a click-tracking domain shared across customers can carry one sender's poor practices into an unrelated sender's delivery. It also asks that every domain in a message, when visited, lead to the owner's site.
Setting one up means adding DNS records for a subdomain you control, as SendGrid's link branding does.
Related terms
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Sources
What this definition rests on. The wording is ours; the facts are theirs.
All 432 terms in the glossaryThe wiki: blocklists and bounce codes