Track Your Newsletter Campaigns for Great Email Analytics (Or Don’t, It’s Your Choice!)

With Keila you have the choice: Track email opens and clicks for your campaigns or send your emails without any tracking at all.

Screenshot of the campaign analytics

How Do Newsletter Analytics Work?

To track your newsletter campaign, Keila, Keila does two things:

  1. Add a tracking pixel to your email. The tracking pixel is an invisible tiny image that includes a personalized tracking code. When the tracking pixel is loaded from the Keila server, we know the email has been opened.
  2. Make all your links tracking-enabled When you add a link to your email newsletter, Keila replaces it with a link to the Keila server that includes a personalized tracking code and immediately redirects to your original link when opened. Like this, we know which links have been clicked by your newsletter recipients.

Each time, a tracking pixel or link is activated, Keila stores this information and that’s how you get newsletter analytics.

Bounce and Complaint Handling

When you send your email campaigns, it’s important to be aware of bounces (i. e. when an email can’t be delivered) and spam complaints (i. e. when a user reports your email as spam to their ISP).

If you’re using Send with Keila on Keila Cloud, we take care of automatically handling bounces and spam complaints. Contacts are unsubscribed automatically after a hard bounce (e.g. when the server reports that an email address doesn’t exist) or after three recent soft bounces (e.g. when the server reports an inbox is out of storage space). When we receive a complaint, we also unsubscribe that contact from your project.

If you’re self-hosting Keila, you can enable automatic bounce and complaint handling for SES senders.

How Does Keila Respect User Privacy?

Keila tries to avoid tracking information about contacts that is not strictly necessary while still providing useful campaign analytics insights.

Keila doesn’t track IP address or cookies from tracking pixels and clicks and on Keila Cloud, we don’t cross-reference contacts between projects.

We’re also planning to add more advanced privacy options for contacts such as disabling tracking entirely or storing only aggregate analytics for campaigns.

Don’t Want Tracking?

Tracking users has become the de-facto standard for all email newsletter tools and across the wider internet. If you don’t want to be part of that, Keila makes it easy for you: Just disable the Enable click/open tracking checkbox and your subscribers can enjoy privacy-friendly and tracking-free newsletters.

Only the number of emails sent, bounces, and spam complaints are reported on the campaign analytics page when tracking is disabled.

Screenshot of the analytics page of an untracked campaign.