How to track your emails with tracking pixels

Analyze and find out how effective your outgoing mails are by tracking them using tracking pixels. This guide walks you through the steps to generate a tracking pixel and analyze its data.

What is an e-mail tracking pixel?

A tracking pixel is a small 1 by 1 pixel image that is embedded in your outgoing emails. Whenever a tracking pixel is triggered or loaded, it collects data from your recipient. A tracking pixel can collect IP-addresses, user-agents, and the date & times on which it was triggered. Based on the IP-addresses we determine locations and based on user-agents we determine the devices. PastePixel supports privacy settings in which you can enable or disable IP-address, user-agent, and date & time tracking.

PastePixel only serves as an indication. If your recipients block images, then the tracking pixel won't be triggered. So, keep that in mind when you analyze your mails.

Track your emails with PastePixel in 4 steps

Follow the following four main steps to track an email:

1. Compose your email
2. Create a PastePixel account
3. Generate and insert tracking pixel
4. Send mail and analyze data

1. Compose your email

Start by preparing your outgoing email. You can compose your email as you normally would. We do recommend you use an email program or service that allows to insert HTML-code and send remotely hosted images.

2. Create a PastePixel account

If you haven't already, create a PastePixel account. Creating an account is free and it allows you generate a tracking pixel and analyze your data. We also have premium tiers that allows you to generate more tracking pixels per day, analyze more data and gives you more features. Check out our pricing page for more information.

To create an account, you only need to enter your email address and password. After registering you will receive a confirmation email with a link to verify your account. If you have done that, you are all settled.

3. Generate and insert tracking pixel

When you are signed into your dashboard, you'll see all mail trackings that you have created. If this is the first time that you use PastePixel it would be empty. Press the "Create new" button to generate a new tracking pixel.

You first need to give your mail tracking a name. This name will be shown on your dashboard.

After pressing "Create", your tracking pixel will be generated. Here you'll see the url of the tracking pixel and an example HTML-code that contains your tracking pixel.

Copy the generated HTML-code. Go back to your email program or service where you compose your email. Here you want to insert the HTML-code at the bottom. Therefore, we recommend you use a program that allows you to insert HTML, it makes things a lot easier.

4. Send mail and analyze data

Now that your email contains a tracking pixel and is ready to be sent out, you can send it! If you go back to the page where you generated your tracking pixel and you scroll all the way down, you see the button "Continue to mail tracking". If you press it, you'll be redirected to your mail tracking page. The moment your tracking pixel has collected data, you will see it there. On the bottom of that page, you can also find your tracking pixel again.

If you want your tracking pixel to stop collecting data, you can pause it. From this page you can also create exports, view custom data and more. Go ahead and explore it.