# How email tracking works

Learn how ProductiveRecruit tracks opens and clicks on outreach emails, what counts as a real engagement, and what a coach's activity means for you.

Every email you send through ProductiveRecruit is automatically tracked for opens and clicks. No setup required. This is what lets you see when a coach opens your email or clicks a link inside it, so you know who's actually engaging instead of guessing.

## How tracking works

ProductiveRecruit builds two tracking mechanisms into every outreach email at send time, whether it goes out through your connected Gmail or an internal ProductiveRecruit address:

- **Open tracking** — a tiny, invisible tracking image is embedded in the email. When the recipient's email client loads that image, it's counted as an open.
- **Click tracking** — links inside the email are routed through ProductiveRecruit before continuing to their real destination, so a click can be recorded before the recipient lands on the actual page.

Both run automatically on every send. There's nothing to turn on, and no separate connection to manage. Tracking is part of how outreach emails work, not a third-party integration you connect or disconnect.

## What counts as a real open or click

Coaches' email systems (and security software their schools run) sometimes load images or scan links automatically, before a human ever sees the message. ProductiveRecruit filters that noise out so the activity you see reflects real people:

- Known security-scanner and antivirus traffic is recognized and excluded from your engagement counts.
- An open only counts once enough time has passed since the email was sent, which screens out mail servers that preview messages instantly on delivery.
- Repeated opens of the same email in a short window don't count as new engagement. You're notified on the *first* genuine open, not every reload.
- The same logic applies to clicks: a click needs a little time to pass after sending, and clicking your own sent link doesn't count as coach engagement.

This keeps your **Opened** status meaningful: it reflects a coach actually looking at your email, not a spam filter passing through it.

## What happens when a coach engages

When a coach opens your email for the first time, its status updates from **Sent** to **Opened** and you get notified. When they click a link (whether that's a link to your public profile or something else in the email), you get notified with the link they clicked. You can see this activity across all your outreach in your [activity feed](/docs/tracking/activity-feed) and see the full status breakdown in [opens, clicks & views](/docs/tracking/opens-clicks-views).

Clicks on links to your own profile are also counted as profile views, so a coach clicking through from an email shows up alongside other visits to your recruiting profile.

> **A click with no open isn't a glitch**
>
> Opens rely on the coach's email client loading that invisible image, and plenty of school and corporate inboxes block remote images by default. Clicks don't have that weakness, because the link itself does the reporting. So you'll sometimes see a link click on an email still sitting at **Sent**. Trust the click: it took a deliberate action, which makes it the stronger of the two signals. More on this in [Why isn't my email being tracked?](/docs/faq/email-not-tracking).

## What's next

- See how tracked activity rolls up across all your outreach in [opens, clicks & views](/docs/tracking/opens-clicks-views).
- Not seeing activity you expected? Check [why an email might not be tracking](/docs/faq/email-not-tracking).
- Review [deliverability and sending limits](/docs/email/deliverability-and-limits) to keep your emails landing in the inbox.

Source: https://productiverecruit.com/docs/email/email-tracking