I'm attempting to track email opens to determine whether social health resources are reaching patients who request them. I've briefly read about using utm parameters or tracking pixels, but am unsure of exactly how to do this.
Thanks all.
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So I am trying to track more information from our order confirmation emails or shipping confirmation emails. I have read online that tracking pixels can track IP addresses, devices, locations, and so on. I have added something like the following code to our emails to track email opens:
<img src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-XXXXXXXX-X&t=event&cid=test&cn=test&cs=email&ec=pixel&ea=open&el=my_email" width=1 height=1 style="display:block;">
Is there a way to get any more data using this method? Or do I have to use some other service in combination with the code in the emails?
Is there a way to get any more data using this method?
Sure, manually crafting GA requests is called measurement protocol in Google Analytics jargon. You can add/override a wide list of fields, here's the complete list from the documentation for référence:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters
And an article, also from official Google docs, related to email tracking with measurement prorocol (event though it is quite short):
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/email
Bé careful for the value used with the cid parameter, as it is used to.discriminate between clients. Using the same value everywhere will count every open as coming from the same user. But I believe the value "test" provided here is just for the sake of the example.
Please also be careful not to send any PII data to GA (name, postal adress, ...)
I am developing an application which has an associated lat,long with the action in open graph. Presently, the api only allows for a place, so I have created my own location object which can be a property of the action.
The problem I perceive here is that this will not form part of the action in a very Facebook way.
I do not want to use Facebook places, nor do I want to have the use create a place when performing an action.
I don't need a lot of granularity, instead, just need "near $locality", such as a village name or national park if no residential addresses exist. This seems to be what happens with the Facebook messages.
Do we know a way of getting low fidelity data from Facebook or other (free) source which allow for locality information to be attached to an action?
Cheers
I'm using rails 2 for this app, with ActionMailer, but this is a general question about emails.
When we send out emails, i save a record corresponding to the email in a database table. I'd like to keep track of whether people have read the emails, and am wondering the best way to do it. On initial googling, it seems like i've stumbled into an ongoing battle between spammers and email clients!
My first thought was to use the "read receipt" header, but i know that this isn't supported by a lot of clients and is therefore unreliable. After that, i read of the tactic of including an image in the mail, and of detecting that image being loaded. I was thinking that i could put a parameter with the email record's id in the image url, so that when i get a request for that image i can see if it has a (for example) email_id param and if so, mark the corresponding email as having been read.
But, then i remembered that many clients are wise to this tactic and specifically ask the viewer of the mail if they want to display images. Obviously they might say no.
Am i right in thinking that i can't pull in other resources, such as stylesheets, in my mail? Because if i can pull them in, i could do that same trick but with the stylesheet rather than an image.
Grateful for any advice, max
Externally-hosted stylesheets are generally treated the same way as images. The client will not download them without prompting the user, if that works at all with HTML-formatted emails.
One thing to consider- you're looking to determine whether the email was read, not necessarily just received, right? Format your email so that it can't be easily read without viewing the images, and include a "view in browser" link at the top. Track image and page-format views and I think you'll have a fairly reliable way to measure actual reads.
Bit late on this, but we've got a similar problem.
We're tracking the links to our site that are included within the email. We're doing this by, like you, having a DB record per email sent out. We've generated a unique hash key per email and are including that as a parameter on all the links included in the email.
We simply then have a before_filter that looks for the parameter and records the fact against the correct email record by using the unique hash to identify the correct one.
We use a unique hash key (rather than the DB's primary key) just so it is a little bit more secure / reliable.
Obviously this method only helps us track the clicks our emails have generated (and not if they've been read) but it is still useful as we can see which of ours users has clicked on which links.
We are having major problems with this as well.
We have task wek portal, where users create tasks (like paint my house) and then we invite painters to give the task creator an price on painting his house.
For that we had a very advanced email system, that sends an invitation and if they accept the invitation we send them the contact info of the task creator.
We need to be able to track if the email was opened, and then once it's opened, we know that the company got the contact info, and we can now send another email to the task creator, telling them that they can expect to be contacted by that company.
The problem is that tracking if the email was opened is not reliable at all. There are different systems for this like msgtag (which does not support a wide range of mail clients like yahoo and other major clients) and our email API client (elastic email) even offer some API call back functions to tell us if each email was opened or bounced or whatever. But again, it's not reliable. To track if it's open, elastic email just includes a 1x1 px image and track if it's opened. So if people don't click "show images in this email" it's not tracked as opened.
So basically we are down to two options.
Have vital portions of the content printed on images, that they have to view to get the info we want to track if they got (in this case contact info)
Just have a link in the email "click here to get the contact info" and then track if that is clicked.
So in conclusion, the "track if opened" is totally useless and unreliable, unless you can fully control which email clients your recipients are using and how they are using them (like if they are all your employees or something).
How google adsense to determine the ads which was clicked is valid or invalid(click by a person maliciously or by bot)?
I know a company doing these kind of work.
http://www.adometry.com/
Formerly knows as Click Forensics.
They are extremely secretive about this. However, their overall strategy is that if they think something is not right, like the traffic or the clicks are coming from specific IP addresses or the ratio of click/page impression is too high, they just suspend the user because they don't want any potential fraudulent activities; advertisement is where all their money is made from.
While I haven't actually used it, an email analytics web app called Litmus claims to be able to track:
How long someone takes to read an email.
Whether it is forwarded.
Whether it is deleted.
Whether it is printed.
What email client was used to read it.
I'm curious about where it gets this information from. Most email clients i've seen don't even load external images without explicitly loading them, let alone javascript.
Even if a lot just support images, that wouldn't give away items 1-3.
Here's my best guess. As this link rockinthesixstring posted says, it relies on images but not javascript.
How long someone takes to read an email.
Place several images in the email that take a while to load, if the email is read for a long time, more are loaded.
Whether it is forwarded.
Is the image loaded from more than one IP/user agent?
Whether it is deleted.
The screenshots show this combined with glanced.
Whether it is printed.
Add a background image bug to a print stylesheet.
What email client was used to read it.
Check the user agent.
Any email analytics application I've seen use an image tracker. Basically if you attach a code generated 1x1 px image somewhere in the email, then during the loading of that image on the server side, you capture all of the ServerVariables
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms524602%28VS.90%29.aspx
EDIT:
I just read some of the information on the Litmus website an it looks as though it confirms what I wrote above regarding image tracking