Mandrill Click Tracking Not Working

"Mandrill click tracking not working" is not an SMTP reply code or a delivery failure — your mail is being sent and delivered fine. It describes a reporting gap: recipients click links in your email, but those clicks don't show up in the Mailchimp Transactional (formerly Mandrill) Outbound activity, message detail, or the click webhook event. The cause is almost always how tracking is configured or how your links are written in the HTML.

What causes Mandrill click tracking to stop recording clicks?

Click tracking is enabled by default account-wide for both HTML and text emails, so in most cases you're troubleshooting something that turned it off rather than something you need to newly enable. Mandrill only rewrites links into tracked redirect URLs when all of these conditions hold. Any one of them breaking is enough to silently drop tracking:

• Click tracking is disabled at the account level. In your account default, the "Track Clicks" setting is set to "No click tracking."
• A per-message track_clicks: false is overriding the account default. The API parameter or SMTP header wins over your account setting — so even with the dashboard configured correctly, a single send can turn tracking off.
• The link is not inside an HTML <a href> tag. Mandrill adds click tracking only to links enclosed in <a> tags in your HTML part. A bare URL pasted as text, or a link only in the plaintext part, is not rewritten.
• The link is a mailto: or bare email-address link. Mandrill never rewrites these for click tracking, even inside a valid <a href> tag — this is expected behavior, not a bug.
• Your tracking mode doesn't cover the part the link is in. Click tracking can be set to all content, HTML-only (clicks_htmlonly), or text-only (clicks_textonly). If tracking is set to HTML-only and the click happens in a plaintext-only message, it isn't tracked — and vice versa.
• The resulting tracked URL would be too long. Per Mandrill's docs, if adding tracking information would create a link longer than 255 bytes (a length some email clients and browsers break on), Mandrill skips rewriting that specific link.
• A mc:disable-tracking attribute is on the link. This opt-out attribute on an individual <a> tag tells Mandrill not to rewrite that one link — easy to leave in by accident from a template.
• Reporting lag. Clicks are recorded in near real time, but under load the dashboard/webhook can be delayed by minutes. A "missing" click may simply not have propagated yet.

How do I fix Mandrill click tracking?

1. Confirm the account default is on. Log in to Mailchimp Transactional, go to Settings → Sending Defaults, and set the Track Clicks dropdown to something other than "No click tracking." Choose the option that covers plaintext too if you send plaintext links you need tracked.

2. Stop a per-message override from disabling it. The account default is only a default — your send call can override it. In the API (messages/send / messages/send-template), make sure you aren't passing track_clicks: false:

{
  "message": {
    "track_clicks": true,
    "html": "<p><a href=\"https://example.com/welcome\">Get started</a></p>"
  }
}

If you send over SMTP, the equivalent is the X-MC-Track header — make sure it includes clicks_all (or clicks_htmlonly) and isn't suppressing clicks. Note that any value other than the documented ones (opens, clicks_all, clicks_htmlonly, clicks_textonly) will disable tracking:

X-MC-Track: opens, clicks_all

3. Use real HTML anchor tags. The clickable link must be <a href="https://...">...</a> in the HTML body. Bare URLs in text and links that only exist in the plaintext part won't be tracked. Use absolute http:///https:// URLs — and remember mailto: links are never tracked, by design.

4. Remove unintended mc:disable-tracking attributes. Search your template/HTML for mc:disable-tracking and delete it from any link you do want tracked. (Keep it only on links you intentionally exclude, like one-click unsubscribe.)

5. Shorten very long links. If a specific link with many query parameters isn't being tracked while others are, the tracked version is likely exceeding the 255-byte limit — shorten the URL or use a redirect.

6. Wait and re-check before assuming failure. Give it a few minutes and confirm against the message detail in Outbound activity or your click webhook, not just a dashboard glance.

If you route Mandrill through Courier, set these tracking options in your Mandrill provider configuration / template HTML the same way — Courier passes the HTML and provider parameters through to Mandrill, so the <a href> and track_clicks rules above still apply.