Email tracking

When you send an email from the CRM, we can tell you when it was opened and which links were clicked. This page explains how that works, what we leave out of the counts, and how much weight to put on the numbers.

The short version: an open is a good hint that someone looked at your email. It is not proof, and it is never an exact figure.

How it works

Opens. We add a tiny invisible image to the top of every email you send. When the recipient's mail app loads that image, we record an open. That is all an "open" is: an image being fetched.

Clicks. Links in the part of the email you wrote are sent through a short tracking address first. We record the click, show a brief "Opening…" page for about half a second, and then send the reader on to the real page. That short page is how we tell a person's browser from a security scanner (more on that below). Each tracking link is signed, so it can only ever forward to the page you linked to. Nobody can reuse it to send people somewhere else.

Both kinds of tracking cover every email sent from the CRM: one-to-one emails, replies, campaigns and sequences, whether they go through a connected mailbox or our own sending.

Why opens are a signal, not a count

Two things push the numbers in opposite directions.

Some real opens are missed. Many mail apps don't load images until the reader allows it. Outlook in a lot of companies works this way. If the image never loads, we never see the open, even if they read every word. A click with no open is the usual sign of this.

Some "opens" aren't people. A few things load the image without anyone reading:

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads every image as soon as the email arrives, whether or not anyone opens it.
• Security scanners at the recipient's company (Mimecast, Proofpoint, Barracuda and others) fetch images and follow links to check them for threats.
• Scripts and servers fetching the email with an HTTP library, not a mail app.

We work hard to tell these apart. You can treat opens as a strong hint, and clicks and replies as the stronger signals.

What we leave out of "Opened"

Every image load is kept, and you can see all of them in the email's activity timeline. But only the ones that look like a person reading count towards Opened, the open count on a contact, and campaign open rates.

These are recorded, labelled in the timeline, and left out of the count:

How we spot security scanners

Many companies run every incoming email through a security service such as Microsoft Defender Safe Links, Mimecast, Proofpoint or Barracuda. When your email arrives, the service opens each link to check it for threats. To a tracking system that looks exactly like clicks. Left alone, one email can show "11 clicks" hours before anyone has even opened it.

We keep every click, but we label each one as a person or a scanner and keep the reasons. A click is treated as a scanner when any of these is true:

Clicked before it was opened is a softer signal. Lots of real buyers have images turned off, so their mail app never records an open, but they still click. On its own, a click before any open is not enough. It only marks a click as a scanner together with one of the signals above, or when the browser never confirmed the click.

The confirmation page

A tracked link first opens a tiny page that sends the reader on with a bit of JavaScript after about half a second. A real browser runs that JavaScript and tells us so. Security scanners fetch the link without running it. So a click is confirmed as a person only when the browser checks in.

This is on by default. An owner can turn it off in Settings → Email (Confirm clicks in the browser). With it off, links go straight through and we rely on the other signals alone.

How the counts show it

• Click badges count people only, for example 2 clicks.
• Scanner clicks appear next to them as a muted +9 scanner chip, so you can see they happened.
• In the activity timeline, scanner rows are greyed out. Hover one to see why, for example "Security scanner: clicked before the email was opened".
• Image loads that weren't a person reading, such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection, show as Automatic open.

Analytics, lead scoring, workflows and anything triggered by "clicked" use the person count only.

Replies and quoted history

When someone replies, their email usually quotes yours underneath, tracking image included. Without care, every later look at that thread would count as another open of your first email. That is how one email could show a hundred opens.

So we clean up the history in both directions:

• When you reply, we take the old tracking image and tracking links out of the quoted part before sending. Only your new message carries tracking.
• When a reply arrives, we remove our tracking image from the quoted part, so reading it in the CRM never counts as an open.

Settings

An owner can change these in Settings → Email.

• Track when emails are opened. Turn it off if your recipients shouldn't be tracked without consent, for example under GDPR. Emails sent while it is off show Opens not tracked instead of Not opened, so you never mistake "we didn't look" for "they didn't read it".
• Track link clicks. Turned off, links go straight to where they point.
• Confirm clicks in the browser. On by default. Tracked links pass through the short "Opening…" page so scanner clicks can be told apart from people. Turn it off to send links straight through.
• Tracking domain. By default, tracking images and links use an agentlyleads.com address. You can use your own instead, such as track.yourcompany.com.

Using your own tracking domain

Mail filters notice when an email from yourcompany.com is full of links to a different domain, and it can count slightly against you. Using a subdomain of your own keeps everything matching. It also means your sending reputation rests on your own domain, not one shared with other workspaces.

1. Pick a subdomain, for example track.yourcompany.com.
2. At your DNS provider, add a CNAME record pointing it to track.agentlyleads.com.
3. As a workspace owner, enter the subdomain in Settings → Email, save it, then click Check DNS.
4. Contact us to switch on the security certificate for your subdomain. We'll send you one more DNS record to add so we can serve it over HTTPS.

We check the CNAME and confirm we can serve tracking securely on it. Until that check passes, we keep using the default address, so nothing breaks while DNS catches up. That can take up to an hour.

Privacy

To tell people from scanners, we store a few details about each open and click:

• The IP address it came from, and which network that address belongs to, so we can recognise security scanners and cloud services.
• The browser or mail app it identified as, its language setting, and whether it was a normal request or only a link check.
• When it happened, and whether the browser confirmed a click.

How we look after this:

• IP addresses are personal data. We clear them from open and click records after 180 days. The rest of the record (time, mail app, whether it was a person) stays so your history still makes sense.
• They are included when you export a contact's data, and deleted with the contact's emails.
• We never work out or show a location from an IP address.
• Only your workspace can see this data. It is used to clean up your counts and for nothing else.
• Images in mail you receive are blocked by default, so other senders can't track you the same way. See the Block remote images setting.

Reading the numbers

Some practical rules of thumb for reps:

• "Opened 3×" over a day or two usually means they came back to it. That is worth a follow-up. Repeats within seconds are already merged, so these are separate visits.
• An open within a minute or two of sending is fine to take at face value now that prefetches and scanners are filtered out. Still, don't read a lot into one open on its own.
• No opens doesn't mean not read. Their mail app may block images. If they clicked or replied, they read it.
• A click on a deal or product page is the strongest signal short of a reply. They wanted to see more. Call or reply while it is fresh, and mention the item they looked at.
• Opens from a new mail app or a different company network after the first open often mean the email was forwarded. Someone else, maybe the person who signs off, is looking at it.

To see these signals summed across campaigns, offers and accounts, see Campaign and conversation analytics.