Tracking email opens

Hi Jon

Off the top of my head I’m not aware of any such specialist service. Most likely you’re talking about adding a pixel gif, or similar, to the e-mails in order to log open activity on a remote server?

I guess you could just stick the relevant code into your templates/creative for the send out? Might be something you could do yourself, depending on volumes / complexity? I’m not sure what web analytics tools you’re using, or how it’s configured, but you could also stick in the gif and then use the web analytics tool to measure and report on requests for that file as a way of tracking open rates?

One thing that we’ve found interesting is the (often large) difference between number of opens vs. number of unique opens, with the latter being more important.

However, open rate tracking in general is getting more of a grey area as people have their "download pictures" (and therefore tracking images) turned off in Outlook etc. by default. Or blocking software stops the tracking.

Equally, it’s hard to tell the difference between an "open-because-the-user-just-previewed-the-email-quickly-before-deleting" vs. a genuine "open-and-read/considered". I guess we could start measuring "time-spent-reading-opened-e-mail" to gauge levels of genuine interest / engagement...? 

Ashley

Hi Jon,

I know exactly what you mean -- we have spoken about email tracking in another venue....

There are a couple of companies that do what I think you are looking for,  NetTracker is one, reasonable, I haven't used them yet. I'm now a new biz still in fledging stage,. Did see demo at Ad-tech New York 2004 - looks pretty good, so I've bookmarked them for a future look.

http://www.sane.com/

Hope this helps, If I think of others, I'll let you know. 

best

Anne Hardy

On 16:04:23 8 February 2005 jbovard wrote:

does anyone know of any 3rd party email opens tracking solutions? im not talking about a full blown mailing system (ASP or otherwised)

im talking about a solution to track our mailouts in terms of opens tracking at a user , campaign and domain level.

our sending mechanism and list mgmt systems are fine. opens tracking is something i would like more of though

thanks

jon

Jon

Various ways to do this, which includes inserting a single pixel in your HTML mailing.

try  http://www.campaignmonitor.com

it's cheap and works great. Tracks everything you seems to be looking for. If you need help let me know

cheers

J

On 16:04:23 8 February 2005 jbovard wrote:

does anyone know of any 3rd party email opens tracking solutions? im not talking about a full blown mailing system (ASP or otherwised)

im talking about a solution to track our mailouts in terms of opens tracking at a user , campaign and domain level.

our sending mechanism and list mgmt systems are fine. opens tracking is something i would like more of though

thanks

jon