[Why I Hate] Email Analytics

If you’ve been in the trenches of email marketing long enough, you start to develop a healthy skepticism for these kinds of metrics. Because the truth is: email analytics have become increasingly unreliable, and they’ve always been a bit of a vanity game.

The analytics are lying to you (kinda)

Let’s start with the obvious. In today’s landscape, “open” doesn’t mean opened. It means a tracking pixel was loaded. Sometimes. Maybe.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection? It pre-loads content to mask user activity. Enterprise firewalls and secure email gateways? They’re now testing links and opening messages with bots at scale. And let’s not forget that Gmail – where a decent share of B2B email actually does end up – has its own filtering and caching tricks that make it increasingly hard to trust basic engagement metrics.

If you’re seeing unusually high opens but suspiciously low click-to-conversion? Yeah, you’re probably watching security bots run dress rehearsals for your actual audience. I’ve combatted these interactions with filters, behavioral analysis, user-agent filters, machine-learned models, you name it.

So, when someone asks how your campaign performed, and all you’ve got is an 18.2% open rate? That number is… a story, maybe. But it’s not the whole story.

What we actually care about (and what our campaigns are for) is traffic acquisition and conversion. Pipeline. Sales. Cash register rings. That’s what should be celebrated. And yes, in a multi-channel marketing world, email might not be the last touch. It might not even be the third touch. But if it helped nudge someone toward booking a demo or requesting pricing, that’s a win.

Unfortunately, we’ve become conditioned to chase the “engagement” dragon instead.

But don’t throw the dashboard out (yet)

Now, before your corporate email ops team comes for me with pitchforks, let me say: Email analytics aren’t entirely useless.

They give you signals – important ones – especially when something is wrong.

If your open rate falls off a cliff overnight, maybe your authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) is misconfigured. Maybe your domain reputation took a hit, or your campaign assets are getting flagged by spam filters. That kind of diagnostic feedback is gold.

So no, you shouldn’t ignore email analytics entirely. But you should reframe how you use them. Less as performance measurement. More as system monitoring.

Attribution is a dumpster fire. It always has been.

Another uncomfortable truth: even in the best conditions, attribution in B2B is hard.

Add in sales cycles that span quarters, multiple stakeholders per deal, and blended digital/offline journeys, and then subtract the ability to trust core email signals, and yeah, you’ve got yourself a mess.

Email used to give us a tidy digital breadcrumb trail. “They opened. Then, they clicked. Then, they demoed.” These days? That chain of custody is broken more often than not.

Still, this is the cost of doing business in a world where users (rightfully) value their privacy. The protections that mask their activity are by design. They’re responding to decades of exploitative marketing strategies, shady list buys, and creepy tracking practices. Can we blame them?

A better way to measure email

So, what do we do? Slow down and consider.

We shift our focus from activity to outcomes.

• Did the campaign drive qualified traffic to our site?
• Did it correlate with an increase in demos or trials?
• Did it warm up cold accounts and revive the pipeline?
• Did it support the goals of a broader campaign – webinar signups, conference attendance, new product awareness?

• Email analytics are increasingly unreliable thanks to privacy tools, bot filters, and anti-spam tech.
• Vanity metrics feel good but don’t drive business decisions. Measure outcomes, not opens.
• Don’t ignore email data entirely. It’s still useful for spotting deliverability or configuration issues.
• Attribution is tough, and it’s getting tougher. But we owe it to our users to respect their privacy.
• Focus on what the campaign was for. Conversions, pipeline, revenue. Not engagement theater.