Engagement is a good measure of the health of your emails. Engaged recipients typically open your emails, click on your links, and take the actions you encourage them to take in your message. To allow you to observe and track your contacts' engagement with your content, Privy leverages three types of tracking in your emails: click tracking, open tracking, and UTM tags.
Click tracking
Click tracking allows you to see if contacts have clicked the links included in your emails. To identify and register these clicks, the URLs in your content are replaced with special tracking links in both Plain Text and HTML content. For example, a button in your email may be linked to a URL like this:
https://wicked-wicks-candle-co.myshopify.com/
When your email arrives in your recipients' inboxes, the link will look something like this instead:
http://s.privymktg.com/ls/click?upn=3D2Ud8Flq1hGzUEqx515Fv-2
When a contact clicks the link in the email, the tracking link redirects them through Privy's servers and sends them to the intended web address. The redirect through Privy's server is logged in your email performance report as a click. This URL change and redirect are invisible to the vast majority of recipients as the link is not readily reviewable and will not appear this way in their browser bar when they get redirected. However, if a recipient inspects their email closely or only reviews their emails in a plain text format, then the tracking URL will be visible.
Note: When a recipient reaches your website, a link will no longer include the s.privymktg.com click tracking component, but it will include UTM (?utm) information. Learn more below.
Open tracking
Open tracking allows you to see if contacts have opened your emails. To identify an email open, Privy automatically embeds an invisible 1-pixel image into your sent emails. When your recipient views the email and the images load, Privy is able to register an open in your email performance report. The included invisible image is hyperlinked to a URL using the following format:
http://s.privymktg.com/wf/open
If the recipient's email client doesn't allow the tracking pixel to load, Privy will not be able to track the email open. The tracking pixel can be deactivated in the following situations:
- The recipient formats their email in plain text.
- The recipient's email client doesn't automatically download images.
- The recipient's corporate filter strips away all images for incoming emails.
UTM tags
UTM tags are snippets of text added to the end of a URL for tracking purposes. Privy automatically adds UTM tags to the links in your email to help answer questions about your traffic, including:
- Why is the traffic coming to your site?
- Where is the traffic coming from?
- How is the traffic getting to you?
Unlike click-and-open tracking, UTM tags are customizable and are much more visible to your recipients as they appear in their browser bar when they land on your site.
To learn more about UTM tags, check out this guide.