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Clicks and Opens Behavior
Marketing Cloud Engagement tracks details about email engagement, such as when a message was opened or when a link was clicked. Click and open events are always related to the original subscriber in a send. Email Studio records all events that occur, as there are no clear indicators whether opens are from a human or a bot program. So if an email is shared, opens or clicks that occur show in tracking or reports as belonging to the original subscriber.
For recorded data, an extra parameter for a unique open and click limits the subscriber to having a single unique open and a single unique click.
Non-Subscriber Activity
All activities, including activities initiated by processes or systems, are recorded to the original subscriber. For example, a virus scan from an internet service provider follows each link in an email to check for security risks. The act of following these links registers as a click event on behalf of the subscriber. These non-subscriber initiated activities count towards the tracking aggregate totals for the original subscriber.
Reports sometimes show that a subscriber has no open activities but several click activities. There are three common scenarios that cause this behavior.
- Recipient Email Client Settings: The recipient’s email client doesn’t load images. Because open tracking depends on an image being loaded, Email Studio doesn’t record an open activity. The recipient can still click links within the message, which results in the report having a higher click rate than open rate.
- Spam and Virus Scanners: A virus scan by an ISP followed links in the email before the subscriber opened it. Virus scans crawl the message and click the links. This event doesn’t register as an open, as they often don’t load images as part of this process. This external change can have a different scale of impact depending on the audience of the send. These changes are external in nature and out of our control. Email Studio continues to record all opens and clicks, regardless of the initiator of the action. Identifying domains where your messages are crawled for this behavior and segmenting those domains out of a send can protect your engagement metrics for the campaign from being skewed.
- Recipient Shared Message on Social Media: Recipients share links from the message on social media and other users click those links. Sharing on social media results in skewed open and click tracking data.
