FeedBlitz adds email open tracking to real-time analytics

To answer the question: are your readers opening the updates? FeedBlitz adds real-time open tracking. Set it on in your feed's settings, like the click-through and subscriber activity analyses. You can see the resulting analytic reports using the same "pie chart" icon option as before. As with all the real-time email metrics, open tracking reports give you the choice of:

• Different time ranges from today to all time.
• For all feeds, individual feeds and metric-dependent detail.
• Chart type.

Each analysis also comes with a table showing the data in text as well as graphically. The open reports split the data down by poll cycle (e.g. nightly), the date of the update (e.g. nightly 2006.03.31) and the day the user opened the update. For privacy reasons only aggregate user data is available; we are not showing publishers which individual clicked on which link or who opened which update.

While tracking opens is a useful metrics to measure, a quick word of warning is merited. Junk filters tend to view open tracking as being hostile and potentially a violation of the reader's privacy. While FeedBlitz isn't using an invisible web bug for this, it is possible that enabling open tacking will reduce your deliverability. Additionally, it only works for HTML mails which enable image downloads. Users who block images or who read the text version cannot be tracked, so your open rate is likely to under-report somewhat. What is therefore important with open tracking is, if you use it, for you to watch the trend more closely than the absolute numbers.

Better quality, real-time and interactive email analytics. Available for all publishers now.

P.S. Subscriber analytics have been updated as well for an extra level of detail. You can now click on the status change values for each feed to drill into the activity for just that status (e.g. to only show unsubscribes, for example).