Click tracking rewrites each link in your email to pass through a redirect that records the click before forwarding the reader on. Where open tracking measures whether an image loaded, click tracking measures whether a person acted—which makes it the half of email analytics worth having.
Why clicks are the trustworthy metric
A click is deliberate. Nobody’s privacy proxy accidentally reads your pricing page—if they clicked, they read the email and cared enough to act. That makes click data useful for the decisions that matter: which content earns attention, which segments are alive (feeding your sunset policy), whether a campaign moved anyone. Opens can’t honestly answer any of those.
What it costs you
- Your links stop being your links. Every URL in the message becomes a tracking redirect. Done on a shared ESP domain, that’s a reputation and trust problem—which is why click tracking and a custom tracking domain are a package deal, not separate decisions.
- Security scanners click things. Corporate mail gateways follow links to inspect them, generating clicks no human made. Click data is far cleaner than open data, but treat single-click signals from corporate domains with mild suspicion—and never make a tracked click perform a destructive action on its own.
- A redirect is a dependency. If the tracking domain has issues, your links do too. (One more reason it should be a subdomain you control.)
The verdict logic
For marketing and lifecycle email, this leans firmly yes: it’s the engagement signal that’s actually real, and the setup cost is one DNS record. For transactional mail, think before enabling it—a password-reset link that passes through a redirect looks less trustworthy to both filters and humans, and you already know the recipient is engaged (they triggered the email). Resend ships both open and click tracking off by default for exactly this reason: turn clicks on deliberately, per domain, for the streams where the data changes decisions.