Skip to main content

​
Custom tracking domain

Every marketing email carries more than your sending domain: the links your readers click, the images they load, the open pixel. By default those are served from a domain Notifizz shares across accounts. With a custom tracking domain, they carry your domain instead.

​
TL;DR

  • One CNAME on a subdomain you own — nothing else to set up.
  • The certificate is issued and renewed automatically; you never handle one.
  • Clicks, images and open pixels move together to your hostname. Nothing else in the email changes.
  • The unsubscribe link stays on our domain by design — it has to keep working for the lifetime of every email you already sent, whatever happens to your DNS.
  • Zero migration: existing campaigns and images keep working, the hostname is resolved when the email is rendered.
  • Available on the top plan. Without it, your emails use our shared domains, which we monitor and rotate ourselves.

​
Why it matters

Anti-spam blocklists work on the domains found inside an email body, not just the sender. When a domain is shared between senders, its reputation is shared too: one careless sender can affect everyone using it. A custom tracking domain removes that coupling for your account. The links in your emails point at a domain only you send from, so its reputation is yours alone — and it matches the sender domain your readers already recognise, which is one less inconsistency for filters to weigh.
This is about content-domain reputation. It does not change your sending-domain authentication (DKIM/SPF/DMARC), and no tracking setup can promise inbox placement.

​
Set it up

1

Pick a subdomain

Choose a subdomain of a domain you own — typically the same domain you send from. mail.example.com, links.example.com and email.example.com are all fine. It must be a subdomain: an apex domain (example.com) cannot carry the required record.
2

Add it in Notifizz

Go to Settings → Email → Domains & DNS, then Tracking domain. Enter the hostname. Notifizz shows you the CNAME target to point it at.
3

Create the CNAME at your DNS provider

Add one record:That single record does double duty: it routes the traffic and proves you control the hostname, so the certificate can be issued.
4

Wait for activation

The status goes from Pending to Active on its own, usually within minutes of the record propagating. The dashboard re-checks periodically; you can also trigger a check yourself. Any verification error is shown verbatim — you are never left staring at a silent “pending”.
Once the domain is active, emails rendered from that moment on use it. Emails sent earlier keep working on the shared domain: their URLs were baked in at send time and we keep serving them.

​
What moves, and what does not

​
Why unsubscribe stays on our domain

The unsubscribe URL is written into every email you send, and it must still work months later. If it lived on your domain and that DNS record was ever changed or removed, unsubscribing would break for every email already in your readers’ mailboxes — with no server-side fix possible, since the URL is already out there. Mailbox providers treat a dead unsubscribe as a violation, and a reader who cannot unsubscribe reports spam instead. So the unsubscribe link stays on a domain we control and monitor. It is one shared URL per promotional email, on a domain dedicated to that single purpose — this is the same trade-off the major email platforms make.

​
If the CNAME later breaks

If the record is removed or repointed, we detect it and:
  • New emails fall back to the shared domain automatically — sending never stops.
  • Already-sent emails keep pointing at your hostname: their links and pixels stop working until the record is restored. This is inherent to any custom-domain tracking, which is why we alert loudly rather than quietly.
  • The dashboard shows the domain as broken, with what we observed.

​
FAQ

No. A single CNAME on the exact hostname is enough — it both routes traffic and validates the certificate.
No. The hostname must be a subdomain. Apex domains cannot carry a CNAME alongside the other records they need.
No, and be wary of anyone claiming otherwise. Those authenticate your sending domain and are configured in Domains & DNS. A tracking domain changes the domains inside the email body — a different, complementary concern.
No. A custom domain changes which hostname serves the pixel, not whether it loads. Privacy features in mail clients (notably image pre-loading) affect open counts the same way either way.
No. Image URLs are resolved when the email is rendered, so existing campaigns pick up the new hostname on their next send with nothing to change.
Rendering falls back to the shared domain immediately. Links in already-sent emails stop resolving; everything else is unaffected.
We check our shared domains against the major anti-spam lists several times a day and can switch to a backup domain within minutes, with nothing to do on your side. You can see the last check on the Deliverability page.