Tracking Multiple email opens

[Benjinc]

We have a number of business use cases where we need to track Total opens as opposed to Unique Opens of emails.

Marketo has no facility to do this (We all know Forward to a friend does now work and is not appropriate in these cases anyway)

Has anyone had any succesful experience of integrating other Pixel trackers in their emails, such as Segment.io or similar in their emails that they can recommend?

[Darshil_Shah1]

Following this! Just wanted to add that there are multiple reasons why the email opens are not reliable metrics and why counting multiple opens is not very practical, such as:

- People opening up emails w/o loading images would not be accounted

- If the images are cached, then the client won't send a request to load the tracking pixel, meaning the multiple opens won't be tracked even though Marketo was able to log the multiple opens for the person-email asset combo

- There are possibilities of false positives getting logged due to the bot activities

[Benjinc]

Yup, we're not looking for confirmed numbers or anything, just trends on where we know emails are forwarded by design in an intra-business setting

[Christiane_Rode]

We've implemented this with a third-party tool and do like the extra data we're seeing. There are quite a few to choose from depending on what your needs are.

As you've mentioned (and as @Darshil_Shah1 outlined), you really only want to be using it for trends as these open metrics can be unreliable for so many reasons. It's also important to combine this data with what you have in Marketo already -- both will provide you with valuable insights.

[Benjinc]

Thanks Christiane, are you able to let me know which vendor you used and any alternatives you looked at?

Thanks,

Ben

[Christiane_Rode · Accepted solution]

We were weighing these tools from more of a deliverability evaluation standpoint (not necessarily gauging opens or post-send success metrics, given we want to move away from using that as a success metric, so my research might not match what you are looking for). But we looked at Litmus and Email on Acid from that perspective, though I think there are others as well. You just have to choose what works for you and your setup -- that's what's most important.

[SanfordWhiteman]

To Christiane’s point, you should describe exactly what data you need for reporting and where you want it to live. Using a deliverability-centric platform’s tracking pixel could well be overkill.

We’ve built a simple “extra pixel” that logs data to a generic web analytics tool on the back end (in that case, Clicky, but it could go anywhere). That worked because it’s the same platform where we link Marketo Lead IDs to analytics IDs.

[Benjinc]

Effectively we just need to know email x was opened x number of times by email address y.

Ideally we would want the metric available within Marketo, alongside unique opens as per our last tool, for ease of extraction. Having looked at our options (readily available, approved tools), segment.io/ mixpanel looks like our best bet. Ultimately I think all data will end up in Tableau. I'll check out Clicky though

Thanks again all for your help.