Email scanners and their Impact on Open and Click tracking

What Are Email Scanners?

Email scanners are security tools used by email clients and anti-spam filters to scan the content of emails for potential threats. These scanners automatically open emails and click on links to verify their safety, which can lead to inaccurate open and click tracking.



How Do Email Scanners Affect Tracking?

• Open Tracking: Email scanners often trigger the open tracking pixel by automatically loading the email, even if the recipient hasn't opened it. This leads to inflated open rates.
• Click Tracking: Scanners may click on all links within an email to check for malicious content, resulting in false click events and skewed click-through rates.



Why It Matters

• Inaccurate Metrics: Inflated open and click rates can distort your email campaign performance, making it difficult to assess user engagement.
• Segmentation Issues: Scanners can lead to improper audience segmentation, as engagement data may not reflect actual user actions.



How to Mitigate the Impact

• Focus on Unique Opens and Clicks: To get more accurate engagement data, rely on unique opens and unique clicks. This ensures that each recipient's actions are counted only once, eliminating false positives caused by scanners.





Conclusion

Email scanners can distort your open and click tracking, making it crucial to focus on unique opens and clicks for more reliable insights into your email campaigns. By relying on unique opens & clicks you can better understand your audience’s true engagement.