Tracking emails & email software user agents

General questions
1

Hi there,

I’d like to track technical details about the usage of email programs/agents as well as screen sizes and device usage. What I found so far is the email campaign feature, which is based on the assumption that the user will be forwarded to an external follow-up page from within the email via URL, while in my case I only want to embedd a tracking pixel, without forwarding the user to an further page.

Any hints how to do this best, as I failed so far configuring a tracking pixel for a system where I dont have a specific URL to referr to?

Thanks!

2

Hi,
I am not 100% sure about your question, but are you not just looking for the image tracker?
https://piwik.org/docs/tracking-api/#use-case-tracking-data-using-the-php-client

3

Indeed, thanks - did not see the wood for the trees :wink:

4

Hi,
now that it’s working, I came across another topic - data that can be tracked. I understood from here (Tracking API - Analytics Platform - Piwik) that it can’t track resolution etc., but I would expect at least it can identify the user/browser agent?

My goal is to identify the different email clients that are used, for compatibility reasons, but given they all behave very different we decided to go the least problematic way regarding HTML code etc. and to not chose the JS option but image only.

Is there a specific feature overview available on what’s supported and what not with image tracking?

Thanks!

5

Hi,
I wish Piwik could have a documentation about it listing a table with the first column what HTML support, second one what JS is supporting, what PHP is supporting… but I have not seen it so far.
Regarding your issue, well I have been surprised to discover recently that MailChimp can now when an e-mail has been opened from a software message provider such as thunderbird or outlook:

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so they may get the information from somewhere

6

Hi,
what you show from Mailchimp is also possible with Piwik from my understanding, as the DeviceDetector will als track the user agents (User agent - Wikipedia) of the email softwares/clients (if known), and will list them too.

Let’s raise this as a feature request then, to get such an an overview :slight_smile:

BR