Introduction

A new report has been developed, allowing you to review the amount of time your contacts spend reading your emails.

It is found under Home->Reports->Email_>Email Time Spent Report

You pick the email you want to review and the report then lists how long each contact spent reading the email, based on Vuture's tracking code.  The time is given in seconds.

Prerequisites

The report works with the Email Module.  There is no additional charge for this report.  It will work with all CRMs and none, and it will appear automatically in your instance once your instance has been deployed with the most recent update.

How is Time Spent Tracked?

Vuture has two ways of logging whether a contact opened an email:

1) The contact downloads one or more of the tracking images inside the email

2) The contact clicks on a link

The Time Spent estimate is based on looking at the time between downloading the different images as they scroll through the email.  Contacts who did not load the tracking images but did click a link are logged as opens, but Vuture cannot calculate the Time Spent.

If contacts do load the tracking images then we have a formula, based on the time these were loaded, to estimate how long the contact spent reading the content. It is not going to be 100% accurate but it should give a guide to how engaged they were with the content.

FAQs

Q. What does it mean if a user shows up in the Time Spent report as having spent 0 seconds in an email?  Does it mean that the user opened the email and then immediately exited out?

A. Not necessarily.  It could also be because Vuture can only track the Time Spent if the contact downloads one or more of the tracking images inside the email.  Contacts who just click a link will be recorded as an Open, but we cannot measure the Time Spent if they do not also download the tracking images.

Q. Is Time Spent only recorded when someone opens an email in their inbox, or does it also count when someone just sees a preview of the email (on the right side of their inbox, for example) and scrolls through that preview, but doesn’t actually open the email?

A. A contact who scrolls through an email in their Preview window and who does not click any links or download any images will not record an Open and will not record any Time Spent.

Q.  I’ve compared the Total Opened and Time Spent data on a few emails, and the numbers don’t match on my report.   Why would this be?

A. This result would come about because some contacts could click a link (and be recorded as Opens) but not download any tracking images, so we cannot record any Time Spent.

Q. Will this report show me how long contacts spent on landing pages too?

A.  No, it doesn't aggregate the time spent on a landing page. Only the time spent on the email after downloading the tracking image is calculated, time spent on a landing page/ any other links from the email will not be included in the total time.