Measuring email traffic
With the advent of Apple Mail Privacy Protection, it becomes even more important for marketers using email to have a good idea of the amount of traffic that emailings generate to websites, landing pages and apps. You normally measure this in two ways: the "clicks" that your email sender (Email Service Provider - ESP) indicates in your emailing statistics and the email traffic on your site measured by web analytics programs like Google Analytics. Ideally, the two pretty much match, but certainly not always. Why is that? In this article we'll take a closer look at that.
What is a "Click"?
A Click means that a recipient clicks on a link in an email you sent. Looking at your statistics, the Click Through (Open) Rate tells you how many people, relative to the number of emails sent or opened, actually respond to the email. Note that there are two ways to look at statistics: total Clicks and unique Clicks. The unique clicks record how many individual recipients clicked on different links in your e-mail. If a recipient clicks once on one link and twice on another link, two unique Clicks are recorded. Total Clicks does not take into account individual recipients and simply adds up all clicks, even if someone clicks on the same link ten times. Of course, the link will then have opened the destination URL ten times through the browser.
When you send an email, the email sender (ESP) looks at the HTML of the email and converts all found links into trackable links. That means the e-mail is converted into a longer link. When the recipient clicks on the link, their browser passes the ESP server before being redirected to the Web site. This happens so quickly that the user is not affected. Thus, your ESP records how often and which links are clicked on and by which recipient. And that is exactly what you as a sender would like to know. If the link goes to a website that contains a tracking script, that is also recorded. This allows you to track your entire conversion right up to the moment of download or purchase. At Ternair, we use the TID (Ternair ID) for this purpose.
Measure in Google Analytics
In web analytics programs you can also measure how much traffic comes to your website from email. But from the other side. The moment the browser registers a visit, the link looks for information that can determine where the visit came from. If the link contains only the URL of the website, then it is registered as Direct Traffic. If the link contains an additional parameter in the form of a code, then it indicates whether the link comes from a Google search (Organic), is a referral from another website (Referral), an E-mail, an Advertisement or a Social Media post. You'll see this detailed under the Provenance or Traffic Acquisition heading of your Web analytics.
Both are wonderful methods that give you very precise information about your visitors, and therefore about the quality of your expressions and the deployment of each of your channels. Something marketers steer towards. However, therein lies directly also the problem.
Differences in measurements
Suppose you have been keeping these statistics for ages and suddenly you notice significant differences between what your e-mail sender (ESP) and your web statistics program indicate. What should you do with that? Which source is right? And what can you report internally about this to colleagues and managers? Is it going well or not?
Although the matter is technically quite complex, there are a few explanations that explain most of the differences. In some cases you can do something about it yourself, in others not. But then at least you know where it comes from.We will look at the following causes below:
Botclicks
Tagging
Botclicks
As indicated, ESPs track when and on which links in your e-mail recipients click. Obviously, you want to be able to assume that behind these clicks are real readers. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. There is software that, upon receiving an e-mail, automatically opens it and clicks. These are clicks from a robot, and we call them "bot clicks." Since 2019, there has been a huge increase in the number of bot clicks in email.
Because bot clicks do not neatly introduce themselves as robots, ESPs set rules when a Click is considered a bot click. This is because they are not the target audience of your email and therefore distort the real result of your emailing. For example, they look at how fast an email is opened and clicked on. If after being sent, the email is opened within a second and clicked three times, you can imagine that this is not a human action. Then the IP address of this recipient is registered as Bot-IP and is no longer included in the statistics. We also apply such rules at Ternair and keep them up-to-date.
By the way, it's certainly not true that all bots are "bad," should you have that idea. Google's bots index Web sites daily to rank them in organic search results. For e-mail, bots are designed to identify links to malware or phishing attacks to prevent them from entering a recipient's inbox. So then it's for security reasons.
While generic agreements between ESPs on methods to identify bot clicks are constantly being worked on, there are no general rules. And because bots are also becoming more sophisticated, the rules must also be updated regularly. The Mail Privacy option introduced by Apple in iOS15 is another example of this. In that case, however, it does not concern Clicks, but registered Opens. Apple does this not for security reasons but for privacy reasons.
Otherwise, the exact same thing applies. A program like Google Analytics is constantly distinguishing incoming bot traffic from human traffic on Web sites. Algorithms are being developed for that too. This also directly indicates why there are differences between e-mail statistics and measured e-mail traffic on the website. Different ways of excluding bot clicks from statistics give different results. Especially at the time when ESPs or Web analytics programs make a big change, big differences can occur. If you use multiple ESPs it becomes even more complicated to differentiate in Analytics.
Tagging
As described earlier, a program like Analytics looks at the URL used to land on a Web site to determine the origin of the visitor. This means that link URLs from email should be tagged. The most common method is utm tagging. In any case, information must be included to the link URL in order for the analytics programs to recognize it as email traffic.
This is quite often forgotten, or content marketers and email editors have not been told that this must be done. In that case, Analytics recognizes only the destination URL, such as www.website.com/pagina and the visit is classified as Direct Traffic. After all, it looks like the URL was typed into a browser. So make sure you've always added the tags to links before sending an email (see Ternair Manual). And should you notice big differences in Email traffic from Analytics, also take a look at how your Direct Traffic is trending.
Recommendation
We recommend:
If in doubt, look to the source with the most "hard" data: your ESP. In it, every click of every email sent is recorded 'hard'. Your provider will let you know if major changes due to 'botclick' measures are imminent.
Compare apples with apples. Compare your ESP to your ESP and Analytics to Analytics. It's better to compare the same source in the same time period, with the same type of content, over longer periods of time. And in the end, you're mostly concerned with actually measuring (target) conversions from email, and then Google Analytics e-commerce is fine for that so you'll see 1-to-1 the real conversion results from email.
Get in touch
Do you have questions about the results of your emailings?
Let our specialists know. They will help you interpret the numbers and optimize your expressions.
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