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How Email Forwarding Affects Your Campaign Tracking

When recipients forward your ContactMonkey emails, the forwarded opens and clicks will appear in your campaign metrics. How this affects your tracking depends on whether you're using Individual or Overall tracking.

Understanding Your Tracking Type

Individual tracking assigns unique trackers to each recipient. You can see exactly who opened or clicked your email. This is recipient-based tracking.

Overall tracking assigns the same trackers to all recipients. You can see how many total opens and clicks occurred, but not which specific people engaged. This is device-based tracking.

To check which tracking type you're using, review your campaign settings before sending.

How Forwarding Affects Individual Tracking

With individual tracking, forwarded emails remain linked to the original recipient who forwarded them.

Example scenario:

  1. You send a campaign to your distribution list
  2. Aisha opens the email and clicks a link
    • Metrics show: 1 unique open, 1 unique click
  3. Aisha forwards the email to a colleague who opens it and clicks
    • Metrics show: 1 unique open, 2 total opens, 1 unique click, 2 total clicks

The metrics still attribute both opens to Aisha because the tracker is linked to her email address.

Identifying Forwarded Emails

To detect if an email was forwarded:

  1. Click Emails at the top of the ContactMonkey dashboard
  2. Click Sent and select your desired email
  3. Find the recipient in the Most Engaged Recipients table
  4. Click on the recipient's name to view their activity details
  5. Check the location data for each open

If you see opens from different locations (for example, one open in Canada and one in the United States), the email was likely forwarded.

Important: ContactMonkey can only track the location of forwarded emails, not the identity of the person who received the forward.

How Forwarding Affects Overall Tracking

With overall tracking, forwarded emails appear as new unique opens and clicks because ContactMonkey cannot identify individual recipients.

Example scenario:

  1. You send a campaign to your distribution list
  2. Aisha opens the email and clicks a link
    • Metrics show: 1 unique open, 1 unique click
  3. Aisha forwards the email to a colleague who opens it and clicks
    • Metrics show: 2 unique opens, 2 unique clicks

You cannot determine which opens came from the original recipient versus forwarded recipients.

 

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