How do you know your Engagement Data is real?

How do you know your engagement data is real?

This is a question that we have been asking here at AudiencePoint since our inception. Some of the questions that we ask are:

Did you get your engagement data from your ESP? 

Was this information generated from your ESP, or was it gathered in some other way? We typically see a few types of data sources: 

• ESP data
• Data from your own tracking pixel
• Purchased data

What is the time zone of my file? 

Here are the options we typically see: 

• UTC
• My Timezone
• The Timezone of the server
• Does it honor DST

Are they suppressing/creating any events?

We often see suppressed or created events from the following sources: 

• Google Image Proxy
• Yahoo! Image Proxy
• Barracuda Firewall
• Apple MPP
• Hey!
• Mimecast

Did the user accidentally create extra events?

Sometimes the users themselves can create additional recorded events that we need to sort through. Here are some common examples.

• Are they arrowing up/down with events
• Did they open/click more than once in the same session
• Are images turned off
• Are there bots auto-opening/clicking?

Other important questions

• Is my ESP already filtering any of these things out?
• Is there a possibility that there was a change made at your ESP, an external dependency that could have changed your data?

Accurate data is matters for several reasons:

1. You are not the only one watching these signals, the mailbox providers watch engagement to determine whether your email should be inboxed.
2. Marketers monitor open and click rates determine what is working and what is not and then determine content, offer and timing based on these metrics.
3. Executives monitor engagement to determine the success of the email marketers.

SELFISH PLUG: Tracking engagement is getting harder and harder. This only reinforces the need for services like AudiencePoint and their product ListFit that have hardened solutions for identifying what email engagement data can be trusted and what cannot.