Editor | 
03 7th, 2009| 
Click tracking and Link tracking are built in to Pinpointe, so you don’t have to do anything to generate nice campaign reports to show these results, but it helps to know how these features work.
Tracking Opens
To track an “open” in an HTML email, we embed a tiny, 1×1 pixel transparent .GIF at the bottom of the message – it’s called a “tracker image” or “web beacon.” Whenever your recipient opens their email, the tracker image is downloaded from the Pinpointe servers, and this is instantly tracked as an email Open. That’s the way things are supposed to work. There’s one glitch here though. Nowadays, thanks mostly to massive amounts of graphic porno spam, as many as 40% of recipients now, by default, will *disable* image displays. Since the beacon or tracker image is just another image, if images are disabled and the recipient actually opens the email but doesn’t enable image viewing, then that open is not tracked. As a sender – encourage your recipients to white list you (or add you to their address book) – this ensures your email gets delivered *and* that images will always be displayed. This is why most people will tell you that you can’t track opens unless it’s an HTML email, and why open tracking results should be taken with a grain of salt. That’s only partly true.
Another tracking phenomenon is … Read the rest of this entry »
