Open and click tracking

Transactional emails are important messages and it is essential to know whether your recipients have engaged with them. Analysing them helps you tailor your email contents for better visibility and user experience. Two such parameters that help you with this are — opens and clicks. You can view this information either in graphical format as well as numerical data in your ZeptoMail account.

Open tracking

Open tracking gives you the count of the number of times an email was opened by the recipient. With this metric, you will know if your emails have reached the recipient's inbox. 

How does it work?

Email opens are captured using pixel tracking, where a small transparent 1X1 image (pixel) is embedded in the header or footer of an email. The image is not visible to the recipient. When the email is opened, the image loads and the open count is registered by ZeptoMail. 

Click tracking

Click tracking tells you if a recipient clicks on the embedded links in your emails. Click tracking keeps track of the content relevance and the number of customers who have followed through to the next step. 

How does it work?

Click tracking works by adding a tracking parameter to the attached URL. Whenever the URL is accessed, the click count will be registered and displayed to the end-user.

How does tracking work?

When you enable tracking, a tracking parameter is added to all the emails you send. Whenever a recipient opens the email or clicks on a link, they are briefly redirected to a tracking subdomain before loading the message or directed to the link. The count registered in the sub-domain will be used by ZeptoMail to show the open and click count.

You can also add a custom tracking sub-domain to track your emails. To use it, you should add a CNAME record in your DNS and point it to ZeptoMail's tracking domain. As a best practice, add the sub-domain of the email-sending domain to avoid ISPs from thinking the tracking domain as a spammer. 

Enable tracking in ZeptoMail

Follow the steps given below to enable email tracking:

1. Login to your ZeptoMail account.
2. Select the desired Mail Agent from the left pane.
3. Navigate to Email Tracking tab. 
   
   
    
4. Use the toggle button to enable tracking (clicks and opens).
   
   
    
5. Next, choose the preferred default value for SMTP/ API parameter. True will track all emails by default. False will use the tracking parameters configured in the email header.
6. Enter the sub-domain you wish to use to track your clicks and click Save. 
   
   
    
7. Verifying the subdomain
   1. You should add the CNAME records shown in the UI to your DNS. You can do this manually or share records with your colleagues.
   2. To share records with the colleagues, click the Share records button. Enter the recipient's email address, a suitable description with instructions to verify the domain and click Send.
   3. Click on Verify and Save to complete the Email Tracking set up.
      
      
       
8. Once you add the CNAME records, the subdomain details will be added to our Admin records. You will receive an email from us once tracking is enabled for you. If you want to disable your tracking at any point in time, you can do so in this section.
9. You can also configure tracking using headers. Use boolean values for the headers to enable or disable tracking. If these headers are not specified, then the data will be tracked as per the default value selected for SMTP/ API parameters in the previous step.
   • ​SMTP header fields: "X-TM-OPEN-TRACK" and "X-TM-CLICK-TRACK"
   • API fields: "track_opens" and "track_clicks"

Tracking metrics in ZeptoMail

The tracking metrics are available in the following sections:

• Reports section - As part of the overall report available in the Reports section.
• Dashboard - The same graph that is available in the Reports section.
• Mail Agent overview - As part of the Mail Agent's overview graph.
• Domains section - Included in the domain's performance graph in the Domains section. The data is available in the Domains section within each Mail Agent.
• Processed emails section - The open and click count for each email is available in the processed emails section.