Email Tracking

General questions
1

Hello-

I’d like some guidance on using piwik to track users open e-mails I’ve sent them (and then their interaction before and after the e-mail). This is a basic rundown of my plan:
[ol]
[li] An agent will compose and send an e-mail to an existing customer. This isn’t necessarily a blast e-mail.
[/li][li] Before my system sends the e-mail I’ll add an img tag with a unique id parameter that I can track this e-mail against. I want to forward this unique id on to piwik.
[/li][li] Sometime later I will query piwik to see if there has been a hit against that unique id and if so I want to cross reference the piwik userId(s) that match.
[/li][/ol]

From what I’ve seen looking around the documentation here the reccomendation is to link this id against a campaign or custom variable, but for me that falls short because I want to possibly track many e-mails. Am I correct in understanding that custom variables aren’t indented to track one-to-many against a user?

I’m starting to think I’ll need to create a plugin to allow for this level of tracking. Is this correct?

2

I have just updated minutes ago a years old post of a script that I’ve written. The thread is titled "Tracking direct downloads with Piwik ".

As to “forwarding this unique ID to Piwik”, I don’t see what you mean. If it’s “have the ID appear somewhere in Piwik’s database”, my script handles that.

Unless you write a plugin that manages its own database/table, I don’t see what you want happening. Your plugin would be a kind of “integration machine”, stitching together existing pieces of software/code like my script. For instance, it would generate the mail ID and store it in the DB table, you would manually include the ID in the mail, and your plugin would query Piwik/monitor the analytics entries, and (we’re still in the “for instance”) it would display either a green check or a red cross to signal what e-mail has been opened with image loading activated. This last point is important: I have no webmail (other than Yahoo Mail) or e-mail client that loads images automatically. Consequently, tracking through e-mail isn’t 100% reliable.

Good luck.