open tracking
Here’s a quick and simple post where I take a moment to share with you the stats from my Spam Resource email newsletter sends — you might have already seen this in the CSA webinar I just did with Marcel Becker from Yahoo. But if not, here you go! As you can see courtesy of the pac-man-like thing above (please don’t sue me, whoever owns pac-man), just a hair under 18% of my tracked opens seem to fall into the Apple MPP category, based on the referrer. (I know that going off of referrer alone is slightly inaccurate, but that’s the easy way to do it and I’m lazy.) This “about 18%” number seems to be pretty static from week-to-week of late. The net here is that my data is a lot different than the data from Sparkpost and others. Their data isn’t wrong — indeed, Sparkpost’s data is a lot more…
Okay, they’re not really opens. They’re proxy-based, false positive pre-loaded opens. Don’t think of them as opens. Think of them as something you want to get out of the way so as to not inflate your campaign tracking. I know, I know… Apple is not the only one proxying opens today. But they’re the big one — over the past few weeks, Apple MPP “opens” have been 25-30% of my opens tracked for each Spam Resource newsletter. And if you’re a typical B2C sender, your percentage is likely even higher.So let’s say you run an email sending platform and you want to give users an option to suppress these opens from tracking. How do you do that?Look for any open that has the very generic referrer of “Mozilla/5.0” with nothing else. This is probably low effort, but keep in mind that it is imperfect. In my testing, 95% of the…
Yeah, I know. Apple blew up open tracking. Other things have been gnawing away at it for a while, but where we’re at now is that for anybody who reads their email messages on a modern iPhone, whether or not they opened the message is no longer something an email sending platform can track accurately. Sparkpost points out that we’re basically at the saturation point: 45-55% of all opens are now now via Apple MPP-enabled users (and thus cannot be trusted).But you know what Apple didn’t break? Your ability to identify (most) of the unengaged. If you’re looking to segment out your unengaged subscribers, those who haven’t opened or clicked in months, proceed as you would have prior to MPP. There’s a margin of error that wasn’t there before — you won’t catch all of the unengaged — but truly, people who show as never having registered? They’re still very…
Today’s guest post comes from my colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz, VP of Industry Relations and Deliverability at Kickbox, keeping us updated on yet another change that affects email privacy and tracking. Take it away, Jennifer!🔔 Ding, ding, ding 🔔 More fun updates about privacy in email. But first, those sneaky ‘spy pixels’ in email are still out there plundering the email world. So to combat them, we have another competitor out there vehemently shaking their fist in their air at them.Full disclosure, I’ve been an active user and proponent of open tracking as a tool for deliverability, but because it’s early in the week, I thought it would be fun to play the antagonist.On January 20th, Bleeping Computer reported on ProtonMail’s introduction of their email tracker blocking system. ProtonMail’s support page confirms that their new “enhanced tracking protection” is now enabled by default for all users. From what I’ve seen…
Is this every possible blog post or FAQ page explaining Apple’s MPP changes aka the death of open tracking? No, probably not. But here’s a bunch. Some I found myself, others were shared with me by many kind folks in the deliverability space. If you want to work your way through all of the guidance to see what you can glean from it, here you go.Act-On: What Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection Means for the Modern MarketerAct-On: Apple MPP Adapt Series: Data AcquisitionAweber: Apple iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection Open Rate TrendsBraze: 9 Smart Ways Email Marketers Can Respond to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection FeatureCampaign Monitor: A Marketer’s Guide to Apple’s Mail Privacy ProtectionConstant Contact: How Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection Impacts Email MarketingCordial: Will iOS 15 break the internet?Emma: Deliverability Insights: How Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will impact the 2021 holiday seasonHubSpot: How HubSpot’s Email Team is Responding to iOS 15Kickbox:…