Monitoring email activity with Amazon Pinpoint
For emails that you send for a project, Amazon Pinpoint provides options for monitoring your email activity.
Amazon Pinpoint analytics
The Analytics pages on the Amazon Pinpoint console provide many email-related metrics for the campaigns and transactional messages that you send for a project. For example, you can view the number of email endpoints that you can send messages to, and the number of endpoints that you've already sent messages to. Also, you can view the open, click, and opt-out rates for messages that you've already sent. For campaign messages, you can view these metrics across all of your campaigns or for individual campaigns. To learn more about these metrics and how to view them, see Amazon Pinpoint analytics.
Amazon Pinpoint provides similar metrics for email that you send for a journey. For example, you can view the number of messages that were opened by participants in each activity of a journey. After you publish a journey, you can view the data for these metrics by using the Journey metrics pane in the journey workspace. To learn more about these metrics, see View journey metrics.
Streaming email event data
To monitor data, such as successful and failed email deliveries, configure Amazon Pinpoint to stream email event data to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams or Amazon Data Firehose. Then, you can use the Kinesis platform to analyze this email data. For more information, see Streaming Amazon Pinpoint events to Kinesis.
For examples of the event data that Amazon Pinpoint streams to Kinesis, see Email events in the Amazon Pinpoint Developer Guide.
Viewing details about email usage
The Email usage and restrictions section of the Email settings page provides information about email usage for your Amazon Pinpoint account. You can see how many emails have been sent from your account during the past 24 hours. You can compare that number to the maximum number of emails that your account is allowed to send during a 24-hour period, referred to as your sending quota. You can also see the maximum number of emails that you can send per second, referred to as your sending rate. For additional detailed reports, see the analytics pages for Campaigns and Transactional messaging.
Note
The email sending quota, rate, and usage values that are shown in this section apply to your entire AWS account in the current AWS Region. If you've used Amazon SES to send emails in the same Region, then this section shows how many email messages you've sent from both Amazon SES and Amazon Pinpoint.
The Email usage and restrictions section also indicates whether your account is in the sandbox. If your account is in the sandbox, your sending quota and sending rate are set to relatively low values, and you can send email only to verified email addresses or domains. For information about requesting an increase to your sending quota or sending rate, see Managing email sending quotas. For information about removing your account from the sandbox, see Amazon Pinpoint email sandbox.
Tracking open and click events in email
Amazon Pinpoint automatically tracks how many of your emails were opened or clicked by their recipients. In order to track the number of opens and clicks, Amazon Pinpoint makes minor changes to the emails that you send.
First, Amazon Pinpoint adds a tiny, transparent image to the end of each email that you send. This image is hosted on an AWS server. The file name of this image is unique for each recipient. When a recipient opens an email, their email client downloads this file from our servers. When an email client downloads a tracking image from our servers, we count it as an open event.
Second, Amazon Pinpoint replaces all links in your emails with links that refer to a domain that is hosted by AWS. This link includes a parameter that is unique for each recipient. When a recipient clicks one of these links, they are first sent to the AWS-hosted domain, and then immediately redirected to their intended destination. When a recipient visits one of these redirect links, we count it as a click event.
If a message recipient clicks multiple links in a message or clicks the same link more than once, those clicks will be counted as one click if they occur within the same hour. Multiple clicks taking place at different hours will be counted as separate clicks. For example, a link is clicked at 8:30 AM and 8:45 AM it will count as one click but if the link is clicked at 8:30 AM and 9:05 AM it will count as two clicks because the hour has changed. Email opens are counted the same way as clicks.
In order to view open and click events, you have to set up event streaming. For more information about creating event streams, see Streaming events with Amazon Pinpoint.
Note
If you have event streaming enabled you will still receive duplicate events and should handle such duplicates in your workflows accordingly.
If a recipient's email server performs link validation checks then these checks will appear as click events.
