Email Tracking
A Word on Click-Through and Open-Rates
- You can gather Click-Through statistics using your webserver
and your webstatistic software, e.g. Google Analytics.
Click here for information
about tracking using Google Analytics.
or (not using Google Analytics):
Create a webpage as link-target on your webserver, which is not linked
from any other source. Include the link to this page in your newsletter
and you can gather statistic information, like e.g. geo-location, number
of unique users, ... but you cannot say who has clicked on it. The privacy
of your members is not at risk.
- "Open-Rates" measures how often someone has "opened"
the message - (clicked on the message to open it). Most todays mailclients
show the message content on the right-side of the application window, so
its most unlikely that someone will really click on it - to open the message.
Today "Open-rates" means the message was displayed in the
mailclient, which does not mean much, the message will be displayed even
if someone just selects a message to delete it or mark it as spam.
Another problem is, that "Open-Rates" are typically based
on external images, which contain a "secret" tracking code
(web-bug).
This information is completely inaccurate, because most todays mailclients
like e.g. MS Outlook, MS Windows Mail or Thunderbird are blocking
all external images for privacy reasons by default. The tracking
code will be downloaded by the mailclient only if the recipient has changed
the privacy settings or has authorized the sender.
If you want to measure the success of your email campaign, then you should
use use the "Click-through" statistics instead, which will give
you detailed information on how many recipients have clicked on a link in
your email.
