How Email Opens and Clicks are Tracked

Overview

Tracking your email opens and clicks are important metrics that can help you understand the success of your email, see who is engaging, and help improve your list segmentation.

Open Tracking

To track your email being opened Sugar Market automatically embeds an invisible 1x1 pixel image at the bottom of your HTML email. Each pixel image embedded is unique to that individual email. When the recipient opens the email, a call is made to the Sugar Market server to retrieve and load the invisible pixel image, and that is when the email open is recorded.

Sometimes, an open may not be recorded due to the pixel image not loading; however, there may have been a click on a link in the email. For this reason, when a link is clicked and no email open has been previously recorded for the recipient, Sugar Market assumes that an open did occur and increases the open count by only one open.

Tracking the loading of the pixel image does have the following limitations:

• Since the recipient has to load the HTML pixel image for an open to be captured, Sugar Market is unable to track the open if the recipient has image loading disabled. This is also the case with plain-text emails since we cannot embed an image in plain-text.
• Additional opens can be registered when recipients scroll through their inbox with email preview enabled. This occurs when the recipient simply lands on your email and opens it for a brief second when searching through their inbox since it initiates a call to the server for the image.
• There are instances where the Unique Opens count in your dashboard will be greater than the actual amount of records in the data table when drilling down. This occurs when an open is recorded that was derived from a click, and not a pixel open. In this scenario, a notification of "Notice a Mismatch?" is shown in the top right of your data table, next to the Export button, indicating there have been clicks with no open records, but the open count is inflated to reflect a more accurate count.

To get the most accurate open statistics, ask your subscribers to add you to their address book or to enable displaying images in their email client. This allows you to track the pixel images more often to improve the open rate accuracy.

Click Tracking

To track when a link in your email is clicked, the link is first directed to a URL that sends a call to the Sugar Market server before it is redirected to the final URL destination you set for the link. To filter out bot clicks from your metrics, we track how long it takes the link to be clicked after the email is opened.