Tracking email campaigns

You can use two types of tracking for the campaign emails.

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

Enabling email campaign tracking

You need to enable on-line marketing if you want to use email campaign 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 email campaigns have tracking enabled by default. You can check the configuration of individual campaigns:

  1. Open the Email marketing application.
  2. Edit individual email campaigns on the Configuration tab.
  3. Ensure that Track opened emails and Track clicked links are enabled.
  4. Click Save.

The system now measures the statistics of campaign emails sent to subscribers.

Note

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

Logging email campaign actions as activities

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

Email campaign activities include the following types of activities:

  • Subscription
  • Unsubscription
  • Opened campaign email
  • Clicked email campaign link

Tracking the email open rate

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

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

  • Emails are only counted as opened if the email client of the subscriber allows the loading of images.
  • If the recipient clicks on a link contained in the email and Track clicked links is enabled for the email campaign, the system recognizes the email as opened even if images are blocked.

To view the statistics of campaign emails, edit email campaign on the Emails tab. The amount of emails that were received and opened by subscribers can be compared side‑by‑side with the total number of sent emails.

Tracking opened emails

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

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

If you enable link tracking for an email campaign, all links in the campaign emails are converted to tracking links when sent out. This applies to both static (template based) and dynamic email campaigns. When a subscriber clicks a tracking link, the system stores a record of the event.

To view the link statistics of emails, edit email campaign on the Emails tab. Click View tracking statistics in the Actions column for any campaign email 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 emails.

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 campaign email:

  1. Edit the content of the email.
  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 (campaign emails keep separate unsubscription statistics by default)
  • Links to local anchors within the content of the email