Open and Click Tracking

If you’re coming from another cold email tool, you might be looking for open tracking and click tracking. Reachkit intentionally does not include either. Here’s why.

Why We Don’t Track Opens

Open tracking works by embedding an invisible pixel in your email. When the recipient’s email client loads the image, it counts as an “open.” The problem is this has become completely unreliable.

False positives are everywhere. Security scanners, spam filters, and privacy tools load images automatically when processing incoming mail. This registers as an “open” even though no one read your email.

False negatives are just as common. Many email clients block images by default. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches all images regardless of whether the user reads the email, while other clients block tracking pixels entirely.

The result is that your open rate ends up nearly random. With both false positives and false negatives at play, the number doesn’t reflect reality. It’s not something you can make decisions with.

On top of that, tracking pixels add HTML to what might otherwise be a clean, text-like email. Email providers can detect tracking pixels, and their presence can hurt your spam score. For cold email, keeping messages clean and text-focused leads to better inbox placement.

Why We Don’t Track Clicks

Click tracking works by rewriting every link in your email to route through a tracking domain before redirecting to the destination. This has two problems:

It leaves a fingerprint. The rewritten links point to a tracking domain instead of your actual destination. Spam filters can detect this. To work around it, you’d need to set up a custom tracking domain with a CNAME record, which adds technical complexity to your setup.

Your links already track visits. If you’re linking to Loom, Google Docs, Gamma, Calendly, or your own website with analytics, those tools already track visits and engagement on their end.

What to Focus On Instead

Reachkit focuses on metrics that actually matter for cold outreach:

• Reply rate: The percentage of contacted leads who replied. Reliable and actionable.
• Positive reply rate: The percentage of replies showing genuine interest, classified automatically by Reachkit’s conversation labeling.
• Bounce rate: Identifies issues with lead list quality.
• Sequence performance: Compare A/B variants to see which messaging works.

These are based on real actions (someone actually replied) rather than unreliable proxy signals.