Tracking E-mail

Typically if you want to track an e-mail campaign you’ll want to do three things:

1. Track who the email was sent to
2. Track who views the e-mail
3. Track who clicks your link(s) within the e-mail

For each of these three steps it is critical that you use the same identity for the person. This and each of the steps are described in further detail below.

Track who the e-mail was sent to

It’s important to track who you sent the e-mail to as this will establish the whole population. Your view rate will be the number of people who viewed the e-mail over the number of people who you sent the e-mail. So for every e-mail that your system sends you’ll want to record an event with KM. This identity might just be the e-mail address of the target recipient. You can record this event with any of our server side APIs. The server-side code for doing this might look like:

KM.identify('john@smith.com')
KM.record('Sent E-mail')

You may also want to pass in other properties, such as which e-mail or variation was sent.

Track who views the e-mail

To track who views the e-mail you’ll want to embed an invisible image inside the e-mail (known as a beacon). This means your e-mail will have to be an HTML e-mail. This beacon will notify KISSmetrics that the e-mail was viewed. Be forewarned that many e-mail clients automatically block these images so your reported numbers will be lower than your actual views. You might call the event Viewed E-mail. Be sure to pass in the same identity you used in the previous step. The beacon URL might look like: http://trk.kissmetrics.com/e?_k=YOUR_KEY&_n=Viewed+E-mail&_p=john@smith.com. Notice that I used the e-mail address as the person’s identity.

Please see our Beacon API for more information on the structure of the beacon URL.

Track who clicks your link(s) within the e-mail

Finally you’ll want to track each link inside your e-mail. We suggest you tag the links in the e-mail to include the following information:

• An indicator that they clicked a link within the e-mail
• The identity of the user (use the same one as the previous two steps)
• You might want to also optionally include which link they clicked if you have multiple links in the e-mail

If you are using the Javascript API you can have KISSmetrics automatically track those links using our URL API. Otherwise, KISSmetrics will not track the clicks on those links automatically. You must add code on your end to handle this. You can use any of the server side APIs or the Javascript API to do this.

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Filed under Advanced