Recording email opens as event

Question

For I while I'm using img tag for tracking email opens. But now i see that every time after sending a email on a second day i have no opens. Last time - i opened my email on second day and i saw it in real time. After that i watched event report and again - 0 events for second day. Maybe You know - what can be a problem?

< img src="http://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=XX-XXXXXXX-X&cid=reciepient_id&t=event&ec=email&ea=open&el=LabelName" >

Ilze

Please describe your Problem in more detail. Would you understand your question if it were asked to you by someone else? — Benvorth
So every time before sending email - i put img tag in my email source code after <body> tag. I put it in form as i posted above (where is GA tracking id to which i want to send events, event category = email, event action - open, event label - changes depending on email i send). So email opens tracks as events in my GA account. Every week when i send about 77k emails, i have 2-3% of opens, what is ok. But every week there is about 500 opens on 1st day, 0 on 2nd and about 500 again in 3rd day. So every week on 2nd day after sending emails I have 0 events. — Ilze

Eduardo Eduardo · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-12T20:37:06

Maybe the image is cached, since it's not downloaded again you won't see it in GA. That's just one of the reasons what you are doing is a terrible idea.

The biggest reason would be because Gmail will cache images for users. So if you send this email to say 100 users, google will cache download the image once and serve to all users. So you'll see a single hit no matter how many users (or no users) open your email.

More info: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

Google Analytics is not a good tool for mail tracking.

Recording email opens as event

1 Answers