tracking
Over on one of the forums the other day, somebody asked about best practices for redirects and link tracking for marketing email sends. Here’s a few of my thoughts.First: avoid the open redirect. If you’re using a redirect tool or feature that lets you just specify the full destination URL in its redirect, that’s bad news. Why? Because bad guys look for these to exploit. What happens is, when they’re used in spam or phishing emails, the domain reputation of the redirect domain goes bad, affected the domain that was abused, but protecting the bad guy’s actual domain. Spammers know this and look for opportunities to do this. Read more about this risk here.Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s what I would call your best (safest) options for domain choice for link/click tracking:Your custom click-tracking domain hosted by your email service provider (ESP). Most ESP platforms…
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…
Understandably, there has been plenty of confusion and angst in the marketing community relating to Apple’s announcement of new privacy features in iOS 15, following WWDC. This is probably the moment when our industry makes it into the zeitgeist, and perhaps not for reasons you might be hoping. Users suddenly realize what is really happening when they read an email… Actually, it’s good news! Consumers are becoming much more aware of the value of their attention and how much they give away when they interact with marketing on the internet, in whatever form. We believe that all users should have a choice on what they see, what data they expose, and who gets to see it. The initial responses to Apple’s announcement seemed to suggest that email was dead, again (how many times has it died already?). But now that the dust is settling, we see that it is a…
These days, browsing the internet feels a lot like wading through quicksand. Almost all web applications first ask users for consent on an unmanageable amount of usage scenarios. The reason behind this: honorable intention of global politics – and the European Union in particular – to return data sovereignty to users after decades of unnoticed data collection by countless service providers. In 2018, the European Union enacted a new legislation to protect its citizens’ personal data, potentially affecting every consumer brand worldwide: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Unlike its predecessor, Directive 95/46/EG, which had to be transposed into national law by EU member states, the GDPR has been directly applicable in all EU member states since May 25, 2018. Why does the GDPR implicate cookie policies? The GDPR was created to enshrine Article 8 of the European Charter of Human Rights,which aims to regulate personal data stored or used by a…