Wakio
Opens and clicks
Opens and clicks show how people reacted to a campaign. Wakio counts an open when someone's mail app loads a tiny invisible image in the email, and a click when someone follows a link in it. Tracking is off until an owner turns it on, and the numbers appear on each campaign's page.
- People who opened the email, counted once each.
- People who clicked any tracked link, counted once each.
- Each link's count, grouped by where it leads.
What is counted, and against what total
Both figures are shown as a number of people and a percentage. The percentage is out of everyone the campaign was sent to, which is the Recipients figure on the same page, not out of the people it reached. That total includes anyone who was suppressed before sending and anyone whose message bounced. Some other tools divide by delivered messages instead, which gives a higher percentage on the same list.
The figures are recounted every time you open the page, so they keep rising after the last message goes out.
Turn tracking on
- Tick it and choose Save to turn tracking on. Clear it to turn tracking off.
Tracking is off by default. An owner turns it on under Settings, with the checkbox Count opens and clicks in marketing campaigns, then Save. Admins and members can see whether it is on, and only an owner can change it.
Tracking applies to marketing campaigns and flows. Transactional email, the kind you send from your own app, is never tracked. Counting what people do can need a lawful basis where you send, so check with whoever advises you before you turn it on.
Tracking is decided twice. When you publish a campaign, Wakio rewrites its links and adds the image only if tracking is on at that moment. Then, as each message is sent, Wakio checks the setting again. Both must be on. A campaign published with tracking off stays untracked even if you turn tracking on before you press Send, and turning tracking off in the middle of a send leaves the messages not yet sent untracked. To track a campaign you published too early, cancel it and copy it into a new draft.
While tracking is off, a campaign's page says "Tracking is off for this account, so opens and clicks are not counted" instead of showing zeros, because zero would look like a measurement. Turn it back on and the figures return, since Wakio does not delete what it recorded.
Turning tracking off does not reach messages already in inboxes. They carry their links with them, and nobody can edit an inbox.
Opens
Each tracked email ends with an image one pixel wide. When a mail app displays the email, it fetches that image from Wakio, and that fetch is the open. A person is counted once, however many times or on however many devices they open the message.
Many mail apps do not load images by default. Someone who reads your email with images off produces no fetch, so their open is invisible to Wakio, as it is to every tool that counts opens this way. That is the main reason open numbers read low.
This also means Clicked can be higher than Opened. A reader with images off who follows a link is a click with no open. Nothing is wrong with the count.
Clicks
Wakio rewrites each link that starts with https:// or http:// so a click passes through Wakio on its way to the real page, and the reader lands where you meant them to. Links that open an email program, and the Unsubscribe and View this in your browser links Wakio adds itself, are never tracked.
Two more kinds of link are left alone:
- A link personalized for each person. If the address contains a merge tag, there is no single address to track.
- A link whose visible text is its own address. Rewriting it would show two different addresses for what looks like one link.
The plain-text version of the email carries the same tracked links, so a click counts the same either way.
Only the first 255 trackable links in an email are tracked. Later ones still work and are not counted.
Clicked counts each person once, however many links they follow. Top links lists the 10 destinations with the most people, counting a person once per destination, so someone who follows three different links shows once in Clicked and once beside each of the three. Two links to the same address in one email merge into a single line.
What is filtered as automated
Security tools and some mail apps fetch images and links without a person looking at them. Wakio marks those fetches as automated, keeps them on record, and leaves them out of Opened, Clicked and Top links. If a person opens the message later, that open replaces the automated one.
Wakio treats a fetch as automated in three cases:
- It happens within 10 seconds of Wakio's delivery confirmation for that message. Some mail apps load images the moment a message arrives, as a privacy feature the reader turned on. That is too fast for anyone to have read it. This check only runs once the delivery confirmation has arrived.
- It names itself as a bot, crawler, spider, scanner or preview tool, or as a common command line or scripting tool.
- It is anything other than an ordinary page request. A link checker that asks whether a link works without loading it does this, and a browser never does when someone clicks.
Gmail's image proxy is counted, deliberately. Gmail fetches images through Google's servers, but only when the reader opens the message, so that is a real open seen through a relay.
A scanner that waits, uses an ordinary browser's name and never says what it is looks exactly like a person. Treat both figures as a best effort at counting people, not an exact count.
Limits
- Busy shared networks can read low. When more than 240 opens, or more than 240 clicks, arrive in a minute from one internet address, Wakio stops recording more from that address for the rest of the minute. The reader still sees the email and still reaches the page they clicked. A large company whose mail passes through one gateway can hit this.
- Test sends are not tracked, and they are never part of a campaign's figures.
- A message's timeline can show an event the campaign leaves out. The timeline on a message's page under Deliveries lists every open and click Wakio stored, including automated ones, so it can show a Click that Clicked does not count.
- There is no account-wide report. Figures appear on each campaign's page, one campaign at a time.
Flows
Flow emails are tracked by the same rules. A flow's links are rewritten when you save the step, and checked again when each email goes out, so both must be on, as for a campaign. A link in a flow email takes the reader to its destination, and the open and click are recorded. Editing a step later never changes where a link in an email it already sent goes.
The only flow figure you can read is the Opened column in the Steps table on a flow's page, one count of people for each email. It leaves out automated fetches and test sends, and it has no percentage. Flows have no Clicked figure and no list of top links. A message's own timeline under Deliveries shows its click.
A flow step can also check whether the person Opened an earlier email or Clicked a link in an earlier email. That check is stricter than the figures. It counts an open or click only when Wakio has positive signs of a person: not marked automated, a delivery confirmation to measure against, and a browser or app name on the request. The Opened column counts anything not marked automated, so it can be higher than the number of people a step would see as having opened.
Good to know
- Deliveries and clicks mark a contact as engaged, and an open does not. Each email delivered to a contact counts, including one your app sends, and so does a click that looks like a person. After a campaign's first stage, Wakio sends to the most recently engaged contacts first.
- A tracked link Wakio cannot verify shows a short page saying the link is not valid, with no way through to the destination. A broken open image still shows the image.