Overview
If you have not yet set up a tracking subdomain, Apollo strongly recommends you turn off open and click tracking to protect your domain reputation and follow email deliverability best practices.
Email tracking systems, which inform you when your emails are opened, use a 1-pixel image called a tracking pixel to obtain interaction data. Each tracking pixel contains individualized code to attribute to the recipient and to the email that they receive. Additionally, if the recipient downloads the image, Apollo also logs it as an email open event.
Apollo's tracking pixel is hosted on Heroku, so the pixel displays as a Heroku URL.
Open tracking is available on certain Apollo plans. If you want to access open tracking, upgrade your plan. If you have questions, reach out to Apollo sales.
Open Tracking Considerations
Sometimes, email tracking systems mark an email as opened when they aren't actually opened. The following scenarios cause false positives:
- In Outlook, the recipient can view the email from the preview pane.
- This causes the tracking pixel to download even though they didn't actually click on the email.
- The email recipient has a Google or G Suite address.
- As Google always proxies every link in an email, they may visit the link as a test. This can trigger an open event without the recipient ever reading the email. It is not a guaranteed outcome, but it is possible.
- On mobile, the Gmail app displays the email on a preview screen.
- This sometimes triggers an email open event without the user seeing more than just the subject and first few words.
You can also experience bot opens. When you send an email to an inbox, anti-virus or security scanning bots often open 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 can inflate your campaign metrics, making it appear that you have a higher open rate than you really do. Apollo allows you to include or exclude bot opens when you report on sequences and emails.
In many instances, Apollo will detect when you open your own engagement messages and exclude these opens during tracking. However, there are some scenarios when Apollo might still track your self-opens as an open event.
| When Apollo can detect and exclude self-opens | The Apollo Chrome Extension can detect self-opens and ensure they aren't counted. The connection between the extension and your Gmail account helps Apollo recognize and exclude self-opens. |
|---|---|
| If you haven't installed the Apollo Chrome Extension, Apollo checks the network IP address of the message opener and compares it with the sender's most recent IP address. When these match, Apollo recognizes the event as a self-open and doesn't track it. Interactions with unsubscribe links and tracking links are intelligently excluded in the same way as opens. When Apollo detects that the unsubscriber and email sender have the same network IP address, Apollo automatically excludes the unsubscribe link in the sent message. IP Address Settings
For security purposes, if Apollo can't read your network's IP address then it can't reliably exclude your self-opens in this manner. If you need to track self-opens in Outlook, contact your ISP or network administrator to switch your connection from IPv6 to IPv4. |
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| When Apollo can't detect and exclude self-opens | Apollo can't detect self-opens if you open one of your emails on a different device than the one you used to send it from. If you send a message from your work laptop and open the same message on your mobile phone, Apollo won't recognize that you've opened your own email. |
On the other hand, false negatives are also possible. This occurs when a contact opens your email but the tracking pixel wasn't downloaded so it didn't trigger an open event. If your contact has set their email to not download images automatically, you may get incomplete data.
The easiest way to combat this and improve your open data is to set up a custom tracking subdomain and include a clickable link in your email. This ensures that anyone who clicked your link, opened and read your message.
If you make changes to an active sequence, you need to turn it off and then on again to activate the changes.
Enhance Open Rates with A/B Testing
A/B testing helps to increase your open rates. By sending multiple versions of the same email, you can analyze the data to discover which version the recipients find most engaging. Use this data to tweak your messaging and enhance your open rates.
To learn more about A/B testing tactics, watch lesson 5 of the master class: Building a World Class Outbound Progam.
Low Open Rate Concerns
More often than not, low open rates for your emails are the direct result of bad deliverability and issues with your domain's reputation.
Some email providers may report emails as successfully delivered, but instead, move them to a contact's spam folder. That means a contact never actually viewed or opened the email. If a contact doesn't view your email, open rates remain low.
To avoid emails being blocked by spam filters and for suggestions to improve your domain's reputation, check out Avoid Spam Filters.