Scenario: Company A sends a daily email to all subscribers which contains a list of real estate properties for rent in that subscribers city.
Each rental property is coded into a simple card format -- title, street address, price, and date listed. For each property, let's say the markup weighs 4kb (after inlining, of course).
The email layout itself is lean, aside from the cards...let's say the file weight is 20kb.
OK. A subscriber in Los Angeles receives his/her daily email. There are seventy-five rental properties in their area, which causes the size of the email to surpass the 102kb limit on Gmail thus clipping that specific subscriber's email halfway through the markup.
But a subscriber living in a small town in Georgia with...let's say 14 properties for rent in their area, would not have their emails clipped.
So, I'm trying to determine if there is a way to track the amount of daily emails to subscribers that are being clipped.
Anyone familiar with a way to detect those metrics? Is there a response from Gmail when an email is clipped that would allow for clipped emails to be tracked?
Thanks in advance!
Email tracking is not as it seems in Gmail. Reason being the images are "downloaded" by Gmail and displayed thru their proxy. This means your analytics will show only one activity.
There might be one way to overcome this using Google's email tracking pixel found here. This will enable you to see the stats of email engagement in real time, all the opens.
For clipping, you will need to place the tracking pixel above the fold. I know all providers suggest placing the pixel at the bottom of the email (re: image download time/speed) but if you use Google's tracking pixel I think you can get away with placing the pixel at the very top (after the pre header) since it's just one line of code.
This will mean you can tracking emails using a third method (you platform, litmus and Google).
I hope my answer made sense and was what you were looking for.
Related
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'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.
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).
I am using a salesforce workflow to send out product information and invoices to clients but I am running into problems thinking of how to verify if a client receives the email and or opens it. Is there any way to prove that a client received my inventory list or invoice? Doing some prior research on this subject I have come across the following suggestions:
Adding a 1x1 invisible image to the email with a unique id
Adding a regular image instead of a 1x1, maybe company logo
Having the recipient click a link to see the invoice
With all these solutions, you have to detect image requests or link request for them and extract/produce a unique id for each client. I am not really sure how to do this in salesforce so any help would be appreciated, along with other detection ideas.
If you have Salesforce Content, there are some ways to expose documents to clients with the features you need. Basically you'll send an email with link and later you can track confirmation of opening, count how many times was it downloaded.. You can also set the expiration date to the document (can't be downloaded anymore after the date).
As for "pure" email from Apex/Visualforce and basically manually recreating the Content's functionality... nowadays most mail clients block external pictures unless explicitly allowed by the mail recipient, so I suspect you'll have poor track of emails marked as opened. Probably you could create a small Visualforce page (no header, no styles, just controller that makes update "invoice viewed" in the database). Display image from Documents on this page (make sure it's "externally available image") or even just display 1 pixel encoded in base64...
Most services offered online today that claim to "track" e-mails,But every one using image.
Is there any way to track the mail?
most of the mail servers blocking the images, after clicking the "download image" they show images,this is not exact tracking.(most of the peoples not like to download the images)
I'm searching other ways.
how this is work with out downloading image
img src="www.mysite.com/?promo=offer1">
You could request a read receipt, but again no guarantee of it being sent.
In short - no there is no way to track an email itself once it has left your local MTA.
If this is for a web promotion, the usual thing is to add a promo identifier to any links back to your website (e.g. "www.mysite.com/specialoffer1" or "www.mysite.com/?promo=offer1") so you can see who has visited as a result of receiving the email.