In this help article, you will learn how to set up a custom tracking domain for Hunter Campaigns when your domain is hosted by the registrar GoDaddy.
Make sure that you have already purchased the domain through GoDaddy and that you have DNS control over your domain. In this tutorial, we will follow along with the domain get-hunter.com.
Set up the Custom Domain
To set up your own custom domain in Hunter, you will need to establish a link between Hunter and your domain. This can be done in 3 steps.
Let's go through each step in detail.
Generate a verification key
In your Hunter account, head to your Campaign settings page, in the Custom Domain section.
In the text area, you will enter a subdomain of your GoDaddy domain. A subdomain is an extension in front of your domain. You can choose to add any word in front of your domain, such as track, tracking, etc. In this case, we've chosen to go with the subdomain tracking.get-hunter.com.
Click on "Set this custom domain".
Next, Hunter will generate a validation key. This can take a couple minutes – it took 3 minutes when creating this guide. Feel free to leave the page if needed.
Once the key is generated, you will find the instructions for the next step: using the key to validate that you own the subdomain.
Verify ownership of your domain
Log in to your GoDaddy account. Head to your Domain section and click on "Manage DNS" next to your domain.
Click on "Add New Record":
This is where you will copy and paste the name and value of the key generated by Hunter:
Type: select "TXT"
Name: copy and paste the NAME from your key in Hunter's Campaigns Settings (here we are copying _acme-challenge.tracking)
Value: copy and paste the VALUE from your key (here we're copying NMZrQtIR6MkhvKmMOAmfABF1W87-kisiEKeVm07_uV0)
TTL: set it to Custom -> 600 seconds (this is the lowest value GoDaddy allows)
Lastly, save the changes. You will then have to wait until Hunter can retrieve the updated value from your provider, which should take around 10 minutes.
Set up CNAME record
Once the ownership of the domain has been verified, you will see the last instructions that are needed so that Hunter can track Campaign emails using your domain.
In your GoDaddy account, on the same page where you created the TXT record (see above for instructions), you will need to either update this record, or simply create a new record.
Type: select "CNAME"
Name: copy and paste the NAME from the information in Hunter's Campaigns Settings (here we are copying tracking)
Value: copy and paste the VALUE from Hunter (here we are copying hunterproxy.com.)
TTL: set it to Custom -> 600 seconds
Save the changes, and wait until the information is updated in Hunter.
Once the custom tracking domain has been set up, you can increase the TTL value of your CNAME record. When you are setting up the domain, you want a short TTL so that the information is updated as soon as possible, but after the initial set up, a higher TTL should make your domain faster, as clients will cache the IP addresses associated with it for a longer period of time. You can for instance set it to GoDaddy's default, which is 1 Hour.
What Custom Tracking looks like in Hunter Campaigns
Once you've activated custom tracking domain, any links inserted in your campaigns will use your own domain rather than one of Hunter's domains to track their performance. This will include links used to track if a recipient opens your emails, the various links that you insert in your emails, and the unsubscribe link.
