1. Email Open Tracking
2. Email Click Tracking
3. Related learning resources
4. Unsubscribe

I. Email Open Tracking

To track an “open” in an HTML email, we need embed a tiny, 1×1 pixel transparent .GIF at the bottom of the message – it’s called a “tracker image” or “web beacon.” ( you can download the ×1 pixel transparent .GIF from http://loganalyzer.net/images/c.gif and save it to your server) Whenever your recipient opens their email, the tracker image is downloaded from the your servers, and this is instantly tracked as an email Open. That’s the way things are supposed to work. There’s one glitch here though. Nowadays, thanks mostly to massive amounts of graphic porno spam, as many as 40% of recipients now, by default, will *disable* image displays. Since the beacon or tracker image is just another image, if images are disabled and the recipient actually opens the email but doesn’t enable image viewing, then that open is not tracked. As a sender – encourage your recipients to white list you (or add you to their address book) – this ensures your email gets delivered and that images will always be displayed.

Opens for text only email can’t be tracked, because there is no way to embed the tracking beacon image like we do in HTML emails. But we can tell when someone clicks on a link. And you can only click on a link if you’ve opened and read the email, right? So if a text-only email is sent and the recipient clicks on a link, then this registers as both an “Open” and a “Click”.

Here’s a simple trick to track email open:

1. Save the 1×1 pixel transparent .GIF in your server
2. Embed the pixel at the bottom of the message and add unique parameter

   e.g.

   http://www.youdomain.com/c.gif?emailid=12345678
3. Send email and after several days, start log analysis work as below
4. Launch Nihuo Web Log Analyzer
5. Create a new profile for email open tracking
6. In Hit Filter page of profile properties dialog, click And button and select Requested file from menu
7. Input full path name of the gif file ( e.g. /c.gif ) and click ok button
8. Click And button and select URL parameter from menu
9. Input the unique parameter ( e.g. emailid=12345678 ) and click ok button
10. Click OK button to close profile properties dialog
11. Right click the profile and select Analyze from menu
12. Total Visits in General Statistics is count of email opens.

II. Email Click Tracking

One of the simplest methods for tracking clicks is to append links which are from the email to the landing pages like so: http://www.yoursite.com/purchase.asp?emailid=12345678 The emailid=12345678 will be recorded in your server logs, which you can then search for instances of. Here’s a simple trick to track email click:

1. Launch Nihuo Web Log Analyzer
2. Create a new profile for email click tracking
3. In visit filter, click And button and select Visitor with specified entry page from menu
4. Input /purchase.asp?emailid=12345678 and click ok button. If you want track clicks from multi emails, please input like so:
   /purchase.asp?emailid=*

   or

   /*.asp*emailid=*
5. Select Tracking page
6. Click Add button
7. Input /purchase.asp and click ok button. (Please add your “order complete” page into tracking list too.)
8. Click OK button to close profile properties dialog
9. Right click the profile and select Analyze from menu

Here are a couple of key metrics you need to pay attention to:

• Total Visits ( Count of clicks from email )
• Pages Per Visit
• Average Time on Site
• Bounce Rate

III. Related learning resources

• Tips for Tracking Email Marketing Campaigns by Google Analytics
• E-mail tracking
• E-mail open rate