Setting up your Custom Domain

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This article will walk you through creating a custom SMS tracking domain to use with your auto-responders and/OR Bulk SMS broadcasts. 

With Custom Domains you are able to track your clicks (active leads), export your clickers, re-target your clickers using event responders or Bulk SMS broadcasts and redirect clicks to a long URL that would otherwise not be suitable for a 160 character message.

Step 1 - Tell your IT department to create a DNS Record for your SMS Domain

Step 2 - Click on Responders > Settings > SMS Link Tracking

 Step 3 - Create DNS record by entering a domain name, a reference and a holding page

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“Click.txtgo.co.uk” in this case represents the text message link for your client.  Click is the CNAME that you need to ultimately add to your DNS record (see next step).  The reference is simply a name for your custom name; if you have many custom domains the reference helps you identify which one you want to use in your SMS.  

 

“Holding page” is the website that your link will send the client to.  The holding page should be used if you want the custom domain (without the unique code) to redirect to your website.  NOTE: When an SMS is created we append a unique code i.e. click.txtgo.co.uk/xR4Ur.  If you do not enter in a holding page URL we, by default, print "Domain is correctly configured"

 

Step 4 - Make sure your DNS CNAME records are pointing to LeadByte 

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If you do not do this, tracking will not work!  We need to take ownership / control of the CNAME to power the click tracking.

 

Step 5 - Verify

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At first, your SMS Domain will appear as Not Verified. As soon as your friendly IT Department has set added the DNS record to your domain, you can go ahead and click verify.  NOTE: Allow up-to 24 hours to allow this to happen.  In reality, it can be as quick as 1 hour.  Make sure the TTL (Time Till Live) is set on your DNS as short as possible).

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From this, you can see we check to make sure verified domains are still working

 

Step 6 - Responder

Click on the Responders tab on LeadByte, followed by Add new Responder Campaign, if you don't have one already.

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Select SMS and then this form will appear:

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Once you input your campaign details, select “Add a new Push”, marked as green.

Here, you can tailor what your text message will look like to your client:

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In the body of the text message you should add the link you’ve previously created. You can do this by clicking on “Insert Custom Domain”, right below the text box.

The following selection screen will show up:

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Once you select this, you can then add the Custom Domain to the push text message.  FYI, with the link redirect you can use data tags.  Any data that you collect against the lead can be included in the URL.  This is commonly used by clients that want to pre-pop form fields or push lead meta data into the URL for deeper reporting in external systems.

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Step 7 - Save and Push

Once you save, you can then text the push in the previous screen. Your message will look like the following (below).  We append a /{code} to the link to track the activity of every SMS sent.  

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Congratulations! You’ve created your DNS Record, your Text Campaign and the text message.

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