Question

How does Woot increment their email button? It opened in my Mail app (mac) and after I sent the email to a friend the count went up. I thought it was just counting clicks, but it’s not. Has anyone ever seen something similar to this before?

Answer 1

It looks like clicking triggers a JavaScript function trackEvent() that sends something like this:

eventType   click
linkType    Email
objectId    457a6f32-4e00-4265-b8fb-09175a41a5ec

to Woot’s servers which causes the counter to increment. It doesn’t update the count without a page refresh which may make it look like the action is more delayed than it actually is, which may be why you thought it was tracking actual emails rather than clicks. I looked in the email it generates and there’s nothing dynamic in it that could be tracked or cause an increment.

URL + params:
http://www.woot.com/analytics/trackevent?eventType=click&linkType=Email&objectId=457a6f32-4e00-4265-b8fb-09175a41a5ec