Why is my email tracking wrong?

Email tracking is an incredibly useful business tool. It allows you to know when and how to follow up with your contacts. With BombBomb's email tracking, you can know when your email was opened, when your video was played, and whether any links were clicked.

How it works

To track your emails, a tiny pixel image is added to the body of your email, called a tracking pixel. When the pixel is loaded, our email tracking assumes your recipient has opened the email. 

The limitations of email tracking

Even though email tracking is super useful and gives you reliable data most of the time, there are times when email tracking gets it wrong. These are limitations that any email tracking software faces. Here are some reasons you may get either a false negative or a false positive in your email tracking. 

False Negatives

1. Image Loading Disabled

• Issue: Some email clients have default settings that block images from loading when an email is opened, particularly on mobile devices.
• Impact: If your recipient’s email client disables image loading, the tracking pixel won’t be triggered, and you won’t be notified of the email open.

2. Tracking Blockers and Security Systems

• Issue: Recipients may have tracking blockers or security systems that prevent tracking pixels from loading.
• Impact: Your tracking information might not reflect that the email was opened or even delivered.

False Positives

1. Email Preview Rendering

• Issue: Sometimes, tracking pixels are activated when an email is previewed rather than actually opened.
• Impact: The email tracking system might incorrectly log the email as opened even if the recipient did not interact with it.

2. Bots Scanning Emails

• Issue: Some email inboxes use bots to scan emails for malicious content or spam.
• Impact: This scanning can lead to multiple tracking events within a short time span, resulting in multiple opens being recorded.

3. Distribution Lists and Forwarding

• Issue: Sending an email to a distribution list or having your email forwarded can cause inflated open counts.
• Impact: For instance, if you send an email to prospect@gmail.com and it is forwarded to 25 people, each open by those 25 recipients will be counted as an open by prospect@gmail.com. This can lead to an inflated count of email opens.

Even with these limitations, email tracking can still be an essential tool in your business. With the knowledge that no email tracker is 100% accurate, you can still reasonably rely on the data to know what email tactics are working, which of your leads is the warmest, and when to follow-up with your contacts.