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Tracking Settings



Privacy and tracking best practices

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Many countries have consumer privacy laws. These laws require you to get a recipient's unambiguous consent before using technologies that track their behavior. This explains why many websites have pop-ups that ask permission to use cookies from that site. These laws consider the transparent pixels included in emails to be a behavioral tracking mechanism.

Open tracking embeds a transparent image in the emails you send. When your recipient opens their email, another server requests these images. This allows Twilio SendGrid to log "open" events.

The Marketing Campaigns service relies on open tracking and turns it on by default. If you use the Marketing Campaigns service and want to send email to recipients with privacy laws, get the consent of your recipients before you send mail.


Open tracking adds an transparent one pixel image to the end of the email. Twilio SendGrid uses this to track email opens. If the email recipient turned on images in their inbox client, the Twilio SendGrid server attempts a request for the transparent image. If this succeeds, SendGrid logs an open event. To see these events, go to Activity.

If you use email link branding, your branded domain serves the open tracking image.

Twilio SendGrid logs two types of opens: a unique open and an open.

  • It logs a unique open the first time a given recipient opens the email only.
  • It logs a normal open for all opens of the email in question.

To turn on open tracking, complete the following steps:

  1. Go to Settings > Tracking(link takes you to an external page).
  2. Click Open Tracking.
    The Open Tracking panel displays.
  3. Toggle Setting State to Enabled.
  4. Click Save.

Click tracking rewrites all the links and URLs in your emails. The links then point to either Twilio SendGrid's servers or the domain you branded your link. When customer clicks a link in the email, SendGrid can track those clicks. SendGrid can track up to 1,000 links per email.

To turn on click tracking, complete the following steps:

  1. Go to Settings > Tracking(link takes you to an external page).
  2. Click Click Tracking.
    The Click Tracking panel displays.
  3. Click Also enable click tracking in plain text emails.
  4. Toggle Setting State to Enabled.
  5. Click Save.

Subscription tracking adds subscription management links to the end of emails. Twilio SendGrid tracks unsubscribed recipients and prevents them from being sent any future emails from you.

You can customize the text attached to emails and customize the landing page. The links can be configured in whatever fashion suits your needs.

To turn on click tracking, complete the following steps:

  1. Go to Settings > Tracking(link takes you to an external page).
  2. Click Subscription Tracking.
    The Subscription Tracking panel displays.
  3. Type the unsubscribe message for HTML versions of your email in the HTML Unsubscribe Content box.
    Enclose the unsubscribe link text in <% %>.
  4. Type the unsubscribe message for text versions of your email in the Plain Text Unsubscribe Content box.
    Enclose the unsubscribe link text in <% %>.
  5. Type the HTML for the page that confirms the unsubscription in the SendGrid Landing Page HTML box.
  6. Toggle Setting State to Enabled.
  7. Click Save.

Google Analytics tracking

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Google Analytics tracking adds data from Google Analytics to your emails. These parameter values identify the settings of your campaign down to each link in the email.

  1. Go to Settings > Tracking(link takes you to an external page).
  2. Click Google Analytics Tracking.
    The Google Analytics Tracking panel displays.
  3. Twilio SendGrid uses the recommended Google settings.
    To override those settings, change the values in the following fields. All of these values differentiate and identify your campaign. They don't affect anything in Google Analytics functionality.
    • Type a different referrer source into the Campaign Source box. This could be something like google, yahoo, or newsletter2025.
    • Type the marketing medium into the Campaign Medium box. This could be something like email, cpc, or banner.
    • Type any paid keywords you set in your GA4 campaign into the Campaign Term box. This applies only to search-based campaigns.
    • Type any terms to differentiate links to the same URL in the Campaign Content box.
    • Type a human-readable term into the Campaign Name box. Choose a term that you can remember.
  4. Toggle Setting State to Enabled.
  5. Click Save.