SMS link tracking for Indian businesses

India processes over 120 billion SMS messages every month. Transactional routes carry OTPs and bank alerts, but promotional routes carry offers, appointment reminders, delivery updates and payment links for businesses that have no other way to reach their customers. Almost none of those links is tracked.

Your bulk-SMS vendor will show you delivery rates. Delivery is not the same as attention. A message that arrives and a message that gets clicked are two different events, and the gap between them is where your real measurement starts.

A delivery receipt confirms the message reached the handset. It says nothing about whether it was read, whether the link was tapped, or what happened after the tap. Most vendors do not offer click tracking at all, and those that do charge separately for it.

The result is that a campaign which produced no sales looks identical to one that drove a hundred orders, because neither number appears anywhere in your vendor dashboard. This is the same problem as email open tracking versus click tracking: the signal you can see is not the signal that matters.

The fix is simple in principle and easy to skip in practice. Generate a separate short link for every campaign or segment using the link shortener, all pointing at the same destination, then embed that link in your SMS. Every tap lands in a count you control rather than a number a vendor chooses to show you.

SMS opens the app or browser, and the link then behaves like any other. If the destination is your product page, the tap shows up in link analytics. If the destination is a checkout, the eventual sale can be tied back to the original click using conversion tracking without Google Analytics.

For Indian sellers using payment links specifically, Razorpay conversion tracking for Indian stores explains how to attribute each payment event back to the SMS link that carried the buyer.

India's TRAI DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) framework requires senders to register templates and headers before sending promotional SMS. That regulation controls what you send, not how you measure it. Short links are unaffected by DLT scrubbing — they pass through as ordinary URLs — so tracking does not add compliance burden, it adds visibility on top of the compliance you already do.