Use piwik to track (gmail) emails

General questions
1

Dear all,

I use the latest version of Piwik on my website and I am quite happy with it.

I would like to add a pixel tracker to my gmail signature, so that I know when someone has opened my email.
It is possible to do so with Piwik? Like embedding a pixel that redirects to the piwik folder of my website?

Do you have an idea?
Many thanks!

Noobie

2

you may use the image tracker GIF: Tracking API - Analytics Platform - Matomo

Which will track newsletter opens etc.

3

thanks matt!

but in practice what should I do? I just add this tracker at the end of my gmail message?

4

[quote=matt]
you may use the image tracker GIF: Tracking API - Analytics Platform - Matomo

Which will track newsletter opens etc.[/quote]

Dear Matt,

Actually I was able to find out how to insert a html tag in the gmail signature.
May I ask you on more question, please?

When I use the tracker gif, and someone opens my email I see a visit on my website coming from Google.
This is normal as Google opens any image on its servers first, and the shows the content on one’s user screen.
Still, it is possible to distinguish between two different emails? That is, if I use the gif TAG for two different emails, how can I know which one has been opened first?

Many thanks!!

5

You can set the parameter &action_name to the name of the newsletter maybe, so you know which newsletter was opened first?

6

The implementation of email open tracking seems straightforward. But does anybody have it actually working, on all email clients including Gmail?

What I am seeing currently is Piwik’s tracking works everywhere except on Gmail. Something about Gmail’s image caching is throwing a wrench in the gears, and it does not track at all, not even once.

Advice appreciated from anyone who might have solved the Piwik Gmail issue. Thank you.

Piwik 2.4.1.

7

Gmail caches the images on the google servers. Could you try to add a URL parameter eg. &rand=RANDOM_VALUE_HERE to the Piwik image tracker? maybe this will bypass Google caching, but not sure.

8

and make sure to upgrade to 2.15.0 as we fixed many security bugs and other critical fixes.

9

This issue is solved. We already had a ‘rand’ parameter, but we also needed to add a ‘bots’ parameter. Gmail image caching is a bot. Piwik and Gmail do not work together without bots=1.