Deliver provides automatic open-tracking and click-tracking of all transactional and marketing communications sent through Slate. These metrics provide useful indicators about who is interacting with your communications and how they are interacting with them. Understanding how open-tracking and click-tracking functions work is essential to interpreting the data that they provide. For a breakdown of different statistics collected by Slate, refer to the Deliver Statistics and Data Points Knowledge Base article. For more in-depth email engagement analytics, consider creating a Split Testing (A/B Testing) campaign. Refer to the Split Testing Knowledge Base article for additional information.

Key points:

• A message "open" event is not available for all circumstances. It is normal for it to not reflect absolutely all messages that were opened.

• A message "click" event is not available for all circumstances.

• Geographic and browser data is not available for Gmail recipients if they have not yet clicked on a link.

• The "mx.technolutions.net" URLs are a necessary component of the tracking. This is the same mechanism employed by other email marketing providers.

• Third-party email filtering programs (such as Gaggle) that pre-scan messages are ignored. Opens and clicks opened by the filtering software won't be included in metrics.

📝 Note

Slate does not track opens and clicks for referral-type mailings in an effort to mitigate the blocking of mailings, click activities, and open activities by firewalls.

Open Tracking

Messages sent through Slate include two body types. The first provides a plain-text representation of the email, which is often used in message previews and older email clients and smartphones. The second provides an HTML rich-text representation of the email. Inside this HTML message, a transparent image is added that loads from a Technolutions server. The image URL includes a unique identifier that indicates the specific message where this image was included. When the image loads, Slate records that the message has been opened.

If the message is opened only in plain text form, no open event can be recorded. If the message if opened, but the email client blocks the external loading of images (the default behavior of Microsoft Outlook and other email clients), the image load and Slate cannot record the open event. If the message is opened by a Gmail user, as of December 2013, Gmail will load the image from its servers. This provides greater open-tracking capability but it also eliminates the ability to identify the browser or location from an open event.

The images are served from the mx.technolutions.net domain.

When a message is opened, we record message ID, the date and time, and the IP address and user agent of the browser. The IP address provides information about the location and network provider of the recipient, and the user agent provides information about the browser, platform, and device used.

Email Click Tracking

Most email clients do not allow running of scripts that might provide asynchronous tracking of clicked URLs. Therefore, email systems use a process of link re-writing to capture the message on which a clicked link appears. For example, a link to http://www.google.com/ might be translated into something like http://mx.technolutions.net/wf/click?upn=12345, where the "12345" portion is a long series of alphanumeric characters that uniquely identify the message and link. When the user clicks this translated link, they are immediately redirected to the destination URL. The stopover at mx.technolutions.net, which lasts only milliseconds, is transparent to the recipient.

For maximum readability, you should make links appear as the text describing the action rather than using the URL. For example, instead of writing "Use Google to search the Internet at www.google.com," write "Use Google to search the Internet," where "Google" (or the entire phrase) appears as the link.

Due to the unaesthetic appearance of these URLs in plain-text communications, where links cannot be masked as they are in an HTML message, we do not currently rewrite URLs for the plain-text message part.

When the recipient clicks a link, we record message the ID, the link, the date and time, and the IP address and user agent of the browser. The IP address provides information on the location and network provider of the recipient, and the user agent provides information on the browser, platform, and device used.