Effectiveness of a newsletter is commonly measured by the amount of delivered messages that are actually opened (and presumably read) or the percentage of readers who "click through" on a link in the message.
Your own definition of effectiveness will vary depending on your newsletter-publishing goals, but you will no doubt want to know as much as you can about which of your messages are opened, read, and which links are clicked.
In this chapter, you will learn how to implement and use the user-tracking and click-tracking features of phpList. These include:
- Enabling user tracking (we refer to user tracking as the visibility of whether or not a message has been opened by a particular recipient)
- Enabling click tracking (we refer to click tracking as the visibility of which links in either our text or HTML messages are clicked on, by which users)
- Examining user/click statistics in greater detail using the "statistics" menu
Note
Privacy and transparency note
While it's a common practice for newsletter publishers to gather as much information as they can from their readers, it's recommended that you explicitly declare what you will and won't record, in a privacy policy which is both published online and referred to in your message content.
User tracking can be used to tell whether a unique recipient of an HTML-formatted message has opened the message in their e-mail client. phpList tracks user activity by embedding a tiny (1 x 1 pixel) transparent image into each HTML-formatted e-mail that it sends. This image, instead of being an actual image file, is a unique URL to a phpList script, whose function when loaded is to record a "hit" in a database table against a unique message ID.
phpList can then examine that database table to tell which messages destined for which users have been opened.
The embedding tracking image will look something like this in the source of your HTML message:
<img src="http://url-to-your-phplist-install.com/ut.php?u=1a555c58f885bf66ec8571d217eea18d&m=26" width="1" height="1" border="0">
As this technique relies on the e-mail being displayed in HTML, it won't work on users who receive your messages in plain text format.
This common technique for e-mail opening tracking suffers from a few limitations—if the user reading the e-mail is (a) not connected to the Internet, or (b) filtering images in their e-mail client, the tracking image won't be fetched and phpList won't record an "open" result against this e-mail.
To enable user tracking on a message, add the placeholder [USERTRACK] anywhere in the HTML body of the message. When the message is sent, phpList will replace this holder with a unique tracking "image" for this user.
To examine the user-tracking statistics in their simplest format, click on the messages link in the sidebar and view the sent messages.
Here is a test message sent with user tracking enabled, but no users had opened the message yet:
Here is the same message after two users have opened the message (and at least one of them opened it more than once, given the difference between the total versus unique views!):
In addition to examining user-tracking statistics per message, we can also view the individual actions of each user. To examine user-tracking statistics per-user, view the user's details and click on the history link:
Now that user tracking is enabled, we are able to see the date and time at which this user opened each message and calculate a per-message, as well as an average, response time (in seconds).
