Email open and click tracking in Zoho Marketing Automation

Email open and click tracking tell you what happens after you hit send. Opens tell you who saw your email. Clicks tell you what they did once they read it. Together, they're the foundation for open rates, click rates, response actions, and any segment or contact scoring rule that depends on engagement.

Overview

This doc walks you through:

What email open and click tracking are and how each one works
Setting up tracking the privacy-conscious way, with contact consent
Turning tracking on or off for your entire organization
Overriding tracking for individual campaigns
What happens to your reports and automations if you turn tracking off

What is email open and click tracking

Email open tracking embeds a tiny, invisible image, a single pixel, into the body of your email. When a recipient opens the message, that pixel loads from Zoho's servers. This tells Zoho Marketing Automation the email was opened, at what time, and from what device type.

For email click tracking, instead of an image, links are placed in your email with tracking URLs. When a recipient clicks one, the click is logged before they're redirected to the original destination. This tells you which links got clicked, how many times, and by whom.

Both settings are available organization-wide and per campaign, so you can choose how granular you want to get.

Turning on tracking for your entire organization

If you want a single policy for every campaign, set it at the organization level.

From the Zoho Marketing Automation dashboard, click the gear icon in the top-right corner and select Settings.
Under Marketing channels, click Email, then click the Tracking tab.
Under Email open tracking, turn the toggle on or off, then choose one:

Complete Tracking. Opens are tracked on every campaign, regardless of what any individual campaign is set to.
Track Opens based on Campaign Settings. Each campaign decides for itself, using its own Track Opens toggle.

Under Email click tracking, turn the toggle on or off, then choose one:

Complete Tracking. Clicks are tracked on every campaign, regardless of what any individual campaign is set to.
Track Clicks based on Campaign Settings. Each campaign decides for itself.

Optionally, turn on Plain text tracking to replace links in plain-text emails with tracking URLs too.

These changes apply across your entire organization as soon as you set them.

Enabling or disabling tracking for individual campaigns

Whether you can control tracking from a campaign depends on what you've chosen at the organization level.

Check whether Email open tracking is set to Track Opens based on Campaign Settings, or Email click tracking is set to Track Clicks based on Campaign Settings.
If either is, open a new or draft campaign and look for the Tracking Details panel.
Turn Track Opens or Track Clicks on or off for that specific campaign.

Info: If either setting is on Complete Tracking instead, that type of tracking already applies to every campaign, and the Tracking Details panel won't show a toggle for it. If both Email open tracking and Email click tracking are set to Complete Tracking, the Tracking Details panel won't appear on the campaign at all.

This is the setup to use if you're sending to a mix of consented and non-consented contacts. Set the organization-wide policy to Track Opens based on Campaign Settings (and Track Clicks based on Campaign Settings, if you're tracking clicks too), then send to a consented segment with tracking on, and to everyone else with tracking off.

What happens when you disable tracking

Turning off open or click tracking, whether at the organization level or for a single campaign, changes what Zoho Marketing Automation can measure going forward:

No new tracking pixels or tracking URLs are added to your emails.
Campaign reports stop showing open rates or click rates for those campaigns.
Response actions set up to trigger on an email opened or link clicked event stop firing.
Lists or segments built on opens or clicks stop updating.
Contact scoring rules based on opens or clicks stop counting new activity.
Journey reports will no longer show open rates, open metrics or click rates.
Journey steps that depend on "email opened", “any link clicked” and “specific link clicked” triggers will stop functioning.

Your existing tracking data and historical reports stay exactly as they are. You just won't collect anything new until tracking is back on.