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 negative 

• Some email clients have a default setting that disables image loading when an email is opened, especially on mobile. If your recipient's email client has disabled image loading, you won't be notified that they opened your email.
• If your recipient has a tracking blocker or security system installed, the tracking (or even your email) may have been blocked. 

False positive

• An error can occur if the tracking pixel is rendered as part of an email preview. Your recipient may not have opened the email, but because the pixel was loaded for the preview, email tracking will consider the email opened.
• You can also get false positives if your recipient's inbox uses bots to scan your email multiple times, looking for malicious files or spam content. This often looks like 10 or more opens in the same minute.
• If you send an email to a distribution list (which multiple people have access to) or if your recipient forwards your email, you may see a lot of opens for one person. For instance, if you send to prospect@gmail.com, then they forward the email to 25 people and each of these people open it, it will look like prospect@gmail.com opened your email 26 times.

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.