Read this article to know how YAMM tracking works and how we anonymize your recipients' data before we process it to provide the tracking metrics for you. Towards helping you with compliance, we provide a choice of setting your email tracking off.

How email tracking works

Our tracking tool lets you know who opened, clicked, replied, unsubscribed to your email and which email addresses bounced.

When tracking is enabled, we generate random YAMM IDs to de-identify the recipients. From then on, these IDs are embedded in the emails they receive and scanned to track their engagement activities.

Have a detailed look into how we anonymize your recipients' data with YAMM IDs, from the time of preparing the mail merge until the end of every user action on your tracked emails.

1. Generation of YAMM IDs

Every time you send a mail merge with the tracker enabled, we generate random but unique YAMM IDs for each recipient's email address of that mail merge campaign. These YAMM IDs are added as notes to each email address' cell of your spreadsheet (the email addresses are never stored in YAMM’s database).

For example, let’s say you are sending an email campaign to promote your new website, and you would like to track the click-through rate.

After sending your mail merge, notice the YAMM ID added as notes to each recipient’s cell.

For this specific recipient (bob.fordemos@gmail.com), we generated two types of IDs:

1. 67005476, which is the randomly generated YAMM ID for this recipient, and
2. 172f0274796c173c, which is the email ID sent to this recipient.

2. Embedment of the YAMM IDs in the emails sent

If you have inserted a link in your email template (e.g., https://support.yet-another-mail-merge.com/hc/en-us ), as shown below.

When your recipients receive your email, the original link is re-encoded and encrypted by embedding the respective YAMM ID to track their activity.

3. Scan of the YAMM IDs when emails are opened/clicked

When a recipient opens/responds or clicks the email, we will only store the YAMM ID and the related action (i.e., Opening an email, unsubscribing etc.).

Therefore, we do not know the email address/identity of the recipient who did a specific action to your email.

done The match between the email address and the YAMM ID is only possible for you by checking your Google Sheet (thanks to the different merge statuses), which we don't have access to.

What data is stored when tracking emails?

YAMM does not store any email address...

... except bounces and unsubscribes

As stated in our Terms of Service:

As of December 2017, we are storing in our database the email addresses of some of your recipients. Specifically, if one of those addresses bounced or if one of your recipients manually unsubscribed (if you added an unsubscribe link in your emails), we will record said address to warn you if we find it again among the recipients of a future campaign. You can manage both lists (unsubscriptions & bounces) in Yet Another Mail Merge web app.

Note that:

• Bounces are email addresses that never or no longer exist.
• You can manage and clean by yourself your list of unsubscriptions from the web app.

How to turn on/off our email tracker?

By default, YAMM has the ‘Track emails opened, clicked or bounced’ option checked in the mail merge configuration panel. So email tracking will be enabled for all your email campaigns by default.

If you don’t want to track your campaign (maybe to adhere to any compliance like GDPR), make sure that 'Track emails opened, clicked or bounced' is not ticked before sending your mail merge.

Email Tracking and GDPR

As a data processor, YAMM is fully committed to being GDPR compliant. Especially with such anonymization of your recipients' data, we ensure the protection of the rights of your data subjects. Not only for our users from the EU, but we also guarantee that we provide the same data protection to all our users.

For you, the data controllers, GDPR mandates that email tracking requires that the recipients have opted in to collection of tracking data. You need to collect clear, affirmative consent before you send them emails, especially for tracking the activity on those emails. We provide some suggestions and various options in YAMM which may be helpful for you in seeking consent from your subscribers.