I work as an email developer, I primarily work within Salesforce marketing cloud.
In some of the emails I work on, we have two CTAs: 'Call Us' and 'Email Us'. Since the links are not a standard tag with a URL that we can add tracking UTMs to, we have a "hack" where we inject the number/email address into the CTA href properties, which allows us to track clicks. At the head of the email, we have some AMPscript variables that look like this.
%%[VAR @Email_CTAVAR @Call_CTA/* UPDATE Email and Call CTA HERE */SET @Email_CTA = Concat("mailto:Yum@gabagoo.com")SET @Call_CTA = "tel:+12223334444”]%%And our Anchor tags look like this
<a href="%%=RedirectTo(@Call_CTA)=%%" alias="Call_CTA">Call Us</a><a href="%%=RedirectTo(@Email_CTA)=%%" alias="Email_CTA">Email Us</a>We learned recently that on Android devices using Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo email clients, when someone uses the "Call Us" CTA we are seeing an injection of tracking data onto the end of the number as it's taken into the phones calling app.
Looking into it, the only solution we have found so far is to not use the AMPscript for the "Call Us" CTA, but this leaves us unable to track clicks for this CTA. Is there a different way for us to count clicks, or a way to prevent this from happening?