Internal Employees Skewing Open / Click Rates

[Ronda_Vye]

Can someone provide a best practice when using  a stream to exclude internal employees (Seed List) from not appearing in your reports so that your open and click through rates are not skewwed by them.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hi Ronda,

Others' approaches will vary but I prefer to use a segmentation. 

Another advantage of segs here is that if you *really* want to stop click tracking for internal users you can use Velocity scripts to conditionally output non-tracked links for that subset.

Of course not sending to these folks at all is best (except for one QA address, say).

[Ronda_Vye]

thank you very much, I haven't created a velocity script yet but will take a run at it!  Thanks for the advice.

[SanfordWhiteman]

The Velocity "comment token" pattern could be used here, too: http://blog.teknkl.com/just-in-time-content-suppression-with-a-comment-token/

(You'd check segment membership directly instead of checking individual fields as in that post.)

[Anonymous]

When developing a landing page, email campaign, etc. you may want to have a testing "stage" where you do all internal testing, etc. Once complete, clone the resource and start fresh.