How to count message views

The Mailer app has a built-in tool for counting recipients who have read your sent messages, which you can use as explained below.

Embed images

For counting how many of your recipients have viewed your message images embedded in the message text are used. Every time a recipient opens your message for the first time in their email client, all embedded images are downloaded from your server and displayed in their email client. The Mailer app registers each image request and associates it with the corresponding recipient.

This information is collected only if the following conditions are satisfied:

1. Images embedded in incoming emails are displayed in recipients’ email clients. If images are not displayed, they are not requested from your server, and thus Mailer cannot count message views.

   There is no way to influence the setting of displaying embedded images in recipients' email clients; therefore, this viewing statistics is always approximate.

2. Images must be embedded using the visual editor (WYSIWYG). In the image-embedding dialog, there are 2 options: upload a file from your computer or enter a URL of an image already available anywhere on the Internet. To enable the message viewing statistics, always embed images by uploading files from your computer:

   

3. Even if you feel uncomfortable when trying to embed an image using the WYSIWYG editor, please use the WYSIWYG editor anyway! Upon uploading an image file, switch to the HTML-editing mode and modify the automatically generated <img> element according to you taste. You may change anything in it except for the image URL, because the URL is what Mailer uses to identify recipients.

We strongly discourage you from using invisible or very small images for counting message views; e.g. 1x1px large transparent or white square images. Email messages containing such small images may be qualified by many popular mail servers as spam.

View statistics

Message views are counted starting from the moment you click on the message-sending button as recipients open the message in their email clients. There is no guaranteed period after which you can be sure you have collected 100% of statistics, because some recipients may open your message in several days or weeks, or even months. However, you will most probably have the greatest portion of data within 2—3 days.

Message viewing statistics are displayed in the form of a pie chart:

The green part of the chart corresponds to the recipients who have viewed the message in their email clients and have selected to display embedded images (or have them displayed automatically by default).

The blue part, marked as “Sent”, corresponds to the recipients who either have not even opened your message or have opened it but did not choose to display embedded images. You may try to collect at least any information about such recipients by using UTM parameters which are added to the URLs of all links in your messages, if you enable this option before sending.