Tracking newsletter e-mails

You can use two types of tracking for the e-mails that deliver newsletter issues to subscribers:

  • Tracking opened e-mails - keeps statistics about the number of e-mails that subscribers actually open.
  • Tracking clicked links - monitors the amount of clicks that subscribers perform on hyperlinks placed in the content of the newsletter issues.

Enabling newsletter tracking

You need to enable on-line marketing if you want to use newsletter tracking for persona and contact group subscribers:

  1. Go to Settings -> On-line marketing.
  2. Ensure that the Enable on-line marketing setting is enabled for your website.
  3. Click Save.

Individual newsletter have tracking enabled by default. To check the configuration of individual newsletters:

  1. Open the Newsletters application.
  2. Edit individual newsletters on the Configuration tab.
  3. Ensure that Track opened e-mails, Track clicked links, and Log on-line marketing activities are enabled.
  4. Click Save.

The system now measures the statistics of newsletter e-mails sent to subscribers.

Note

  • You cannot use tracking retroactively for e-mails that have already been sent before you enabled the settings.
  • The system does not include draft e-mails in the tracking statistics.

Logging newsletter actions as activities

If you want the actions related to a specific newsletter to be logged as on-line marketing activities, enable the Log newsletter actions as on‑line marketing activities property on the Configuration tab.

Newsletter activities include the following types of events:

  • Subscription
  • Unsubscription
  • E‑mail opening
  • Link clickthrough

Tracking the e-mail open rate

This type of tracking allows you to monitor how many newsletter e-mails are actually opened by subscribers. Open rate is one of the key metrics for judging an e-mail campaign’s success.

The system tracks the open rate by embedding a small, invisible image into the content of e-mails. When this image is requested from the server for the first time, the system marks the e-mail as received and opened for the given subscriber. As a result, the indicated number of opened e-mails may be slightly lower than the actual amount.

  • E-mails are only counted as opened if the e-mail client of the subscriber allows the loading of images.
  • If the recipient clicks on a link contained in the e-mail and Track clicked links is enabled for the newsletter, the system recognizes the e-mail as opened even if images are blocked.

To view the statistics of issues, edit newsletters on the Issues tab. The amount of e-mails that were received and opened by subscribers can be compared side‑by‑side with the total number of sent e-mails.

Tracking opened emails

If the number of opened e-mails is greater than zero, you can click the number to see a dialog with a detailed list of all subscribers who opened the e-mail. You can filter the subscribers according to their name, e-mail address or the time interval during which they opened the e-mail.

You can measure the effectiveness of e-mail campaigns based on their click-through rate. The system tracks which links in newsletter e-mails are clicked by the recipients and how many times.

If you enable link tracking for a newsletter, all links in the issues are converted to tracking links. This applies to both template-based and dynamic newsletters. When a subscriber clicks a tracking link, the system stores a record of the event.

To view the link statistics of issues, edit newsletters on the Issues tab. Click View tracking statistics in the Actions column for any issue that contains tracked hyperlinks.

  • Unique clicks - shows how many different subscribers clicked on the link.
  • Total clicks - indicates how many times the link was clicked, including multiple clicks from the same user.
  • Click rate (%) - displays the clickthrough rate of the link as a percentage. Calculated as the number of unique clicks divided by the total amount of sent e-mails.

To see more details, click View participating subscribers for specific links. This opens another dialog containing the names and addresses of the subscribers that used the given link and their respective click count.

Excluding links from tracking

To manually disable tracking for a link in a newsletter issue:

  1. Edit the content of the issue.
  2. Click Source on the editor toolbar to switch to source mode.
  3. Insert the tracking=“false” attribute into the <a> tag of the given hyperlink.

For example: <a href=“http://www.kentico.com/home.aspx” tracking=“false”>Kentico</a>

In addition, tracking excludes the following links automatically:

  • Unsubscription links generated by the {%UnsubscribeLink%} expression (newsletters keep separate unsubscription statistics by default)
  • Links to local anchors within the content of the e-mail