Knowledge Base

Our email tracking feature lets companies know how often customers are opening their emails. The feature works by adding tracking pixels to emails with tracking enabled, which registers when recipients open emails.

However, it’s important to remember that your customers may have email providers that prevent the tracking of email opens and link clicks. In 2021, both Apple Mail and Gmail implemented new mail privacy policies to protect their consumers.

In these cases, Pipedrive can‘t provide any tracking information for those emails and the emails performance reports won’t reflect this data.

How can I accurately measure email tracking?

Pixel-based email tracking is only accurate if your customers’ email providers allow it, so while email tracking is helpful, there‘s no way to know if customers are opening your emails in the first place.

Here are a few tips to make sure you’re getting the best data possible:

• Link tracking is not affected by policies or caching, making it one of the most reliable engagement metrics
• Focus on reliable and actionable data like deliverability, bounces, unsubscribes and spam reports.
• Spam reports and unsubscribe requests can help you identify content irrelevant to your customers or diagnose weaknesses in your campaigns. Also, bounces can indicate outdated contact details or other issues with your email lists.

These metrics provide information about your email performance and what resonates with your customers, while also helping you protect your sender reputation.

Apple Mail Privacy Protection

Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) is a set of features that allows users of the Apple Mail app or desktop email app to hide information about when, where and how they open emails.

The following operating systems have implemented this privacy protection:

• iOS 15
• iPadOS 15
• macOS Monterey
• watchOS 8

Any users running these operating systems, or operating systems released since then, won’t be trackable using pixel images if Apple Mail app with MPP is turned on.

Gmail image caching

For security reasons, instead of loading images from an external host server each time someone opens an email, Gmail stores these images locally on its own proxy servers.

Email images download automatically in all Gmail accounts, but users can configure this manually. If your recipients disable the option to download images automatically, the tracking pixel won’t download automatically and the open tracking won’t count towards your reports.

How does this affect my Insights reports?

The fields that are affected are listed below.

Email performance report:

• Segment by: open tracking
• Table view: opened time (tracking)
• Summary: opened, not opened
• Filters: open tracking, opened time (tracking)

Campaigns performance report:

• Open tracking (opened, not opened)
• Total opens
• Unique opens
• Email open time
• Email open date
• Recipient country
• Open rate
• Geo-location