Tracking Opens and Clicks
Campaigns can record who opened a message and which links they followed. Both are switches per campaign, and both have caveats worth understanding.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Commercial:
- Campaign Manager — the tracking switches and reporting
Architect Panel → Security:
- Cookie Consent — your wider consent position
How click tracking works
Links in the message body are rewritten to pass through the platform, which records the click and forwards the visitor. Each click records the campaign, the link, the recipient, the time, the address and the browser.
Clicks are reliable; opens are not
A click is a real action by a real person. Open tracking depends on an image loading, and a great deal now interferes with that: mail clients that block remote images by default, privacy features that pre-load every image whether or not anybody looked, and corporate scanners that fetch everything.
So treat opens as a rough directional signal at best. A campaign with 60% opens and 0.5% clicks did not engage anybody. Judge campaigns on clicks.
What to do with the data
The useful questions are comparative rather than absolute: did this subject line do better than that one, which link in the message drew interest, which segment responds.
Absolute rates are hard to interpret and vary enormously by sector and list quality. Your own trend over time is worth more than any benchmark.
Link rewriting changes the URL
Recipients see a platform address rather than the destination, and some people check before clicking. It is worth being aware of, particularly for audiences trained to be cautious about links — and it is a reason to send from a recognisable domain.
Tracking is personal data
A record that a named individual opened a message and followed a link, from an address, at a time, is information about them. It is not anonymous analytics.
That means it belongs in your privacy notice, needs a retention period, and should be restricted like other personal data. Enabling tracking because it is available, without deciding any of that, is the common failure.
Consider whether you need it
If nobody will act on the data, do not collect it. Tracking that nobody reads is pure liability — you hold behavioural data about your contacts and get nothing for it.
Where you do use it, being able to say what it is for is both good practice and a good discipline.
Be careful using it as a signal about individuals
Treating an open as interest and acting on it — a sales call because somebody opened an e-mail — is a step beyond measuring a campaign, and people find it uncomfortable when they realise. Given how unreliable opens are, it is also frequently wrong.
Worked example
A team enables click tracking and leaves open tracking off, on the grounds that opens would not change any decision they make. They compare click rates across subject lines over six campaigns, find one style consistently better, and set a twelve-month retention on click data. Their privacy notice says what is recorded and why.
Recommendations
- Judge campaigns on clicks, not opens.
- Do not enable tracking you will not act on.
- Set retention and cover it in your privacy notice.
- Compare against your own history, not external benchmarks.