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We recently added some tracking to our email templates to fire an email -> open event when an email is viewed.

This looked like it was working very nicely but we've subsequently realised that it also increased the overall session count. Arguably this makes sense, but is there any way to track an event without increasing sessions?

We would ideally like to track email openings without counting them as sessions on our website. If it's not possible, we're going to have to back it out and implement this ourselves.

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We've just found out that using of parameter ni=1 in your link helps to not invoke session start. See https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters#ni

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  • Very interesting, thanks. We're actually about to start looking at emails again so I'll check this out soon.
    – Adam Taylor
    May 25 '16 at 11:35
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You can use img tag in email body. I'm not sure only about increasing overall session count if you will pin this to you site UA ID, but if it will you can easily create new ID for this events.

Here you have more complex informations: http://dyn.com/blog/tracking-email-opens-via-google-analytics/

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  • Thanks, that's exactly what we did but unfortunately all events add to the session count. We could setup a new GA profile/account but that is not a great solution either. Thanks though.
    – Adam Taylor
    Feb 10 '15 at 15:02
  • Can you describe me about why it's not. I mean with data you want to achieve by using one GA profile? Btw. it's something like roll-up GA function to get same user session between many GA profiles, so maybe this will be helpful. About events I ask some people from my local community, maybe they will know solution.support.google.com/analytics/answer/6096167?hl=en-GB
    – sync667
    Feb 10 '15 at 15:58
  • In measurement protocol you don't have opt-non interaction on events. So my friend do not see any way. developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/… Question is if you want to track opens, why you don't want take this to session count. Or if you don't want to why you can't take that to new profile? Event's without session increasing will be bugged on GA - 0 time and 0pv - it's not better to send this like normal hit(pv)? That's what my friends think about this :)
    – sync667
    Feb 10 '15 at 22:46
  • Well, you are right, we could track in a separate profile, it's not in theory any worse than tracking it ourselves outside of GA, it just seems a bit annoying more than anything. We get a huge amount of traffic from email, which is why we couldn't leave it, as it skewed our numbers massively.
    – Adam Taylor
    Feb 17 '15 at 18:01

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