Tracking Broadcast Messages

What is Broadcast Message tracking?

Once a Broadcast message is sent to recipients the tracking begins! So, what is tracking exactly? When a message recipient receives a Broadcast message and opens it, that action is logged by your CollegePlannerPro account. It captures the date and time of when the student or parent opened the message. This helps you know who received your Broadcast message and when. The tracking statistics from the most recent sent message are displayed on the “Broadcast Main” page by default. To view statistics for other sent messages, click on the message and a pop-up window will open, showing you the current results. See further details on our tracking methods below.

Viewing sent message recipients

To view the list of recipients for a sent message simply click on the message on the “Broadcast Main” page. In the dialog window that opens, click the button at the bottom labeled, “View Recipients.” A list of recipients will appear in a new dialog window in a “table sortable” view. Click the table’s column headers to sort the list in the order you wish.

A note about message tracking:

If a message recipient elects to not “download images” or “show images” when viewing your Broadcast message, the tracking may not count the message as "opened" for this recipient. If this happens, note that the “opened” count will actually be higher than what is displayed within CollegePlannerPro.

How email tracking works:

To track opens, it's a standard practice across the email marketing industry to embed a unique, transparent, single-pixel image into every email that's sent. The image pixel is completely invisible and has no impact on your email design. When contacts open your email, a call is made to load the email content, including the image pixel. Every time the image pixel is called, it counts as an open, and because the image pixel is unique to your email, the opens are also unique to your email. For example, if a recipient's email program previews a portion of the email, it may render the tracking image even if the user doesn’t open the email, thus indicating a false positive on your end that the email has indeed been opened. Even though the email isn't actively opened with intentional action, when it displays in the preview panel it also displays the image pixel. This is why we track unique opens and all opens.

Keep in mind, that tracking recipients who have opened Broadcasts is a bit of an imperfect science, especially following some recent email privacy updates released by Apple, but our method of email tracking is the industry standard.