Email Tracking Overview

Overview

Email tracking is a critical part of understanding engagement and optimizing outreach. Whether you're aiming to increase replies, book more meetings, or evaluate campaign effectiveness, tracking opens, clicks, and replies can give you powerful insights.

Apollo gives you detailed visibility into these engagement signals and includes built-in tools to account for bot activity, which can otherwise distort your results. Unlike most platforms, Apollo lets you choose whether to include or exclude bot events from your reporting, helping you get a more accurate picture of real human engagement.

While open and click tracking can be valuable, they should be used strategically. For users with a strong sending reputation and a solid grasp of email deliverability best practices, tracking can inform targeted, time-bound testing. But for broader campaigns, excessive tracking can increase the risk of deliverability issues.

Check out the following sections to learn more about how Apollo tracks email engagement, how bot detection works, and best practices for interpreting your results.

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How It Works on Apollo

Apollo tracks engagement by detecting when someone opens your email, clicks a link, or replies to your message using standard tracking tools like pixels, link redirects, and mailbox monitoring.

Apollo recommends only turning tracking on for short-term tests and specific use cases. For optimal deliverability, avoid always-on tracking unless you have a very strong domain reputation.

• Open tracking: Apollo inserts a small, 1-pixel tracking image into the body of the email. When the recipient’s email client loads the image, it triggers an event that records the open. This method depends on image loading being enabled on the recipient’s side. Ready to use open tracking? Get started.

• Click tracking: Apollo wraps the links in your email with redirect URLs. When a recipient clicks a link, they are routed through Apollo’s secure tracking servers before being redirected to their destination. This process logs the click while maintaining a seamless experience for the prospect. Ready to use click tracking? Get started.

• Reply tracking: When a recipient responds to an email, Apollo detects the reply using message thread matching and mailbox activity. This ensures that replies are accurately attributed to the correct contact and sequence step. Replies are automatically detected on Apollo without any setup required. No setup needed: reply tracking works automatically.

You can enable open or click tracking on a per-user basis. If you enable either type of tracking, Apollo tracks engagement across all your connected mailboxes.

If you want your whole team to use it, each person needs to turn it on in their own settings.

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Understanding Bot Activity

When you send an email to an inbox, anti-virus or security scanning bots often open, scan, and click through the email to ensure there's nothing harmful in it. Mailbox providers may also prefetch text or images to ensure emails load faster when the recipient views them. These events are helpful because they improve the inbox experience and protect people from spam and malware.

However, bots can also inflate your campaign metrics, making it appear that you have a higher open or click rate than you really do. Most sales engagement platforms don't filter out bot events. When you incorporate bot opens and clicks, even if a recipient hasn't interacted, it results in inflated engagement rates. In turn, this may lead to a misdirected strategy and campaign spend.

While no system is perfect at identifying bots, Apollo helps by using an advanced detection and filtering process to automatically determine if a bot likely opened or clicked your emails, then gives you the option to include or exclude the bots in your sequence statistics and analytics reports and dashboards. With control over your engagement tracking, you can determine whether bots should be included in your metrics.

Since no system is accurate enough to detect all bot events, an open or click rate excluding bot tracking represents the minimum possible engagement, while including bot tracking reflects the maximum. The real, definitive number likely falls somewhere within this range.

If you're seeing unusually high open or click rates without any replies, there's a good chance bots are involved. Filtering them out can give you a clearer view of how your emails are really performing.

To learn how to manage bot filtering in your reporting, check out the Reporting and Best Practices.

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Reporting and Best Practices

Once you understand how Apollo tracks opens, clicks, and replies, and how bots can affect those signals, you can start making better decisions based on your data.

• Report on email engagement
• Include or exclude bots in reporting
• Explore best practices

Report on engagement

Apollo offers several built-in reports to help you track opens, clicks, and replies across your outreach. These reports give you visibility into overall performance, sequence effectiveness, and trends over time.

Some helpful pre-built reports include:

• Prospecting email performance funnel: A full-funnel view of sent emails, opens, clicks, and replies.

• Email engagement dashboard: Shows engagement rates across campaigns and users, with bot filtering options.

• Most effective email sequences: Identifies which sequences and steps generate the highest open, click, and reply rates.

• Email activity by week: Breaks down opens, clicks, and replies over time to help you spot trends.

To learn more about using a report built by Apollo, check out Use Analytics Reports.

You can also create a custom report to track specific tracking metrics by sequence, user, or team.

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Include or exclude bots in reporting

Apollo gives you flexibility with how bot data is handled in your reporting. By default, bot opens and clicks are excluded, but you can choose whether to include bot opens and clicks when you check sequence metrics or run reports on Apollo.

• Sequences
• Reports

1. Launch Apollo and click Sequences.
2. Select your sequence.
3. Apollo shares sequence status and email tracking statistics per individual contact.
4. Under email tracking statistics, bot opens and clicks are included by default. Toggle off Include bots to exclude bots.

You have now filtered your sequence metrics. To learn more, check out Report on Sequences.

1. Launch Apollo and click Analytics.
2. Click Create report.
3. Select an email metric for opens or clicks:

Includes bot opens	Excludes bot opens
# emails opened (unfiltered)	# emails opened
% emails opened (unfiltered)	% emails opened
# emails clicked (unfiltered)	# emails clicked
% emails clicked (unfiltered)	% emails clicked

You have now filtered your analytics reports. To learn more, visit Analytics Reports.

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Explore best practices

When evaluating engagement metrics, look at trends across multiple signals rather than relying on opens or clicks alone. If your opens are high but replies are low, that could be a sign of bot activity, or it might mean your messaging needs adjustment.

Here are a few best practices to improve accuracy and protect deliverability:

• Use tracking selectively. Only enable open or click tracking when you're running a targeted test or campaign. Avoid using it by default on every message.

• Check for mismatched signals. High opens or clicks with no replies may point to bot interference. Try viewing the report with bots excluded to compare.

• Avoid link-heavy or image-heavy emails. These can trigger security scanners and increase the chance of bot events.

• Monitor reply rates. Replies are the most reliable signal of human engagement and should carry the most weight in performance decisions.

When in doubt, use replies and conversions to guide your strategy, and use open or click rates as directional insight only.

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Next Steps

Keep up the momentum with these next steps:

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