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How to Track a Pixel

In the context of MVMCloud Analytics a pixel is a small image that you attach to your newsletter email to know how many people opened the email and read it.

Email Tracking

To track how many people open and read your emails, you can add the following HTML image code:


<img src="https://analytics.mvmcloud.net/js/tracker.php?idsite=YOUR_MVMCLOUD_WEBSITE_ID&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" style="border:0;” alt="" />

After adding this code in your emails, when your users open and read it, it will add a new entry “Page Title” to “Email Opened” in your Behavior > Page Titles report. You will also be able to see this information in the Visit Log.

In this example, replace:

  • https://analytics.mvmcloud.net/ by the URL of the server MVMCloud Analytics where your website is configured;
  • YOUR_MVMCLOUD_WEBSITE_ID with your site ID on the server above (how to find site ID).

When using the above HTML code, the following information will also be recorded in MVMCloud Analytics:

  • &url=%2Femail-opened%2Fnewsletter_XYZ - Registers a page view with the URL defined as “/email-opened/newsletter_XYZ” in Behavior >> Page URLs;
  • &action_name=Email%20opened - Registers a Page Title defined as “Email opened” in Behavior >> Page Titles;
  • &_rcn=internal%20email%20name - Registers a campaign visit and defines the campaign name as “internal email name” in the Acquisition >> Campaigns report;
  • &_rck=newsletter_XYZ - This will also set the campaign keyword to "newsletter_XYZ" (set it to the name of this specific email, e.g. "Summer-2017-August-Sales") in ** Acquisition >> Campaigns**;
  • When the people receiving your emails are all on the same internal networks and using a similar email client, you will find that the value of the Unique Users/Unique Visitors KPI metric will be wrong. To solve this problem it is necessary to attach the parameter: &cid= which must be defined as a unique string generated with exactly 16 hexadecimal characters (containing only the characters 01234567890abcdefABCDEF). This will set the visitor ID to a unique string for each email recipient, ensuring MVMCloud Analytics tracks them correctly.
  • &rec=1 - For the order to be effectively registered.
  • &bots=1 - Include all connections made to this request, bots included.

You may have noticed some special characters here, like %20, %2F. This is because the URL is encoded. We strongly recommend that you do the coding so that your tracking is not interrupted. Many tools are available on the web to encode your URLs, such as urlencoder.org.

You can find the image tracking code (more simplified than the one mentioned here) in MVMCloud Analytics in Administration >> Sites >> Tracking code, click on the Image tracking link. See the image below:

Image tracking code

Important Note About Inaccurate Data

Some email providers (including gmail/google apps) preload all email message images by default, which results in tracking email opened in MVMCloud Analytics even if the user has not yet opened the email. This inaccuracy it also affects any other email analysis tools.