Track how many people opened a newsletter

If you want to know how many readers open your newsletter, you can add an image beacon (also called pixel tracking) to your email’s HTML and track email openings with Piwik PRO.

The image beacon is a 1-pixel-by-1-pixel transparent image that is pasted into the email’s HTML. When the image loads, Piwik PRO logs information about the visitor (your reader) and their session.

To track the email openings, follow these steps:

1. This is the code you need to modify, to work for your website:

   <img style="border: 0;" src="https://example.piwik.pro/piwik.php?idsite=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&rec=1&bots=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Femail-opened%2Fnewsletter_XYZ&action_name=Email%20opened&_rcn=internal%20email%20name&_rck=newsletter_XYZ">

2. https://example.piwik.pro: change to the name of your account.
3. idsite=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000: change to your website ID.
4. In this line of code, you can change a few things:

   url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Femail-opened%2Fnewsletter_XYZ&action_name=Email%20opened&_rcn=internal%20email%20name&_rck=newsletter_XYZ

   • This https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2Femail-opened%2Fnewsletter_XYZ is an encoded version of the page URL that you’ll see in reports after the email is opened. The decoded version looks like this: https://example.com/email-opened/newsletter_XYZ. You can change elements in this code so that it shows your domain and the proper name of your newsletter.
   • This action_name= is the name of tracked action. Again this Email%20opened is an encoded version of Email opened. You can change that to a different action name.
   • This _rcn= is the campaign name used in the campaign report. Again this internal%20email%20name is an encoded version of internal email name. You can change that to a different campaign name.
   • This _rck is the campaign keyword used in the campaign report. You can change this newsletter_XYZ to a different campaign keyword.
5. Once you have the modified code, add it to the newsletter’s HTML.
6. Now, when somebody opens your newsletter, you will see a new page titled Email openedin the page title report under Menu > Analytics > Pages > Page titles.

In addition to tracking email openings, you can also track how many readers clicked on the links in the newsletter. For that, you’ll need to add campaign parameters to the destination URL. To learn more about tracking campaigns read this chapter in our guide Analytics for Beginners.