I realize there are things in place to prevent tracking, especially on Apple products. This negatively affects the accuracy of the analytics numbers we seen the Ghost dashboard. How about we tweak the code so that if someone clicks a link in an email they receive, even if they have tracking turned off, Ghost can still increment the “opens”? Because if you’ve clicked a link in an email, then you’ve definitely opened the email. Right?
What say ye?
You have a logical point: an email must be opened to click the links within.
As it seems Ghost is already tracking exactly who clicked on what, it would be possible to make sure the open is counted if there’s a click.
Someone with a popular newsletter and some SQL skill could check how often this case comes up.
With the anti-tracking that Apple has baked into their email apps, this is likely a very big problem. It’s true Apple users can turn off that anti-tracking feature, but I think it’s turned on by default.
I’ve just ‘discovered’ this problem … and unsurprisingly others have seen it before.
I’m looking to remove and/or unsubscribe inactive subscribers so have been looking at email open numbers and ‘last seen’ data. I noticed that a small proportion of subscribers are clicking on email links without apparently opening the email.
Here are some numbers (emails opened, count of users who clicked on an email, users recorded as clicking but NOT recorded as opening email, %age) :
Of course, I don’t have an idea of the platform these particular subscribers are on, though over the same month the overall figures were 29% iOS, 28% Android, 25% Windows, 16% MacOS.
I therefore don’t think it’s as simple as ‘missing’ all Apple users, or that it’s a large number.
What it does mean is that I can’t use email’s being sent but not opened as a measure of whether a subscriber is inactive. Perhaps we need another filter to capture ‘any’ subscriber activity - click link, open email, sign in etc?
Proton Mail does the same as Apple. They have a default behaviour of ignoring any and all trackers in the email. That one can be opted out by a user, and if so Proton Mail automatically “opens” all emails while they process it. By doing it that way, the tracker doesn’t get any information about the intended recipient. And both ways makes a mess of the statistics for open & read.
