Why do you sometimes see many opens from a single address?
Under Results → Campaigns → Opens → Open, you can see every individual time your newsletter has been opened. A single email address can appear there multiple times, sometimes even dozens of times.
Laposta detects an open when an invisible image in your newsletter is loaded (see openratio in the glossary). This only means that the newsletter was shown on the screen. It does not tell you how often someone has actually read your email.
What counts towards your openratio
Only the ‘First time’ a subscriber opens your newsletter counts towards the openratio. You will see all subsequent opens from the same address in the overview, but they are not counted again.
A high total number of opens does not mean your newsletter has been read more often. Compare campaigns based on the openratio, not on the total number of opens.
A few extra opens from the same address
After the first time, you will often see a few extra opens. This is usually due to one of the following reasons:
- A shared mailbox: different people open the email in the same inbox, with each reader generating their own open.
- Forwarding: a recipient forwards the newsletter and the next recipient opens it too.
- Briefly back on screen: people first check their email quickly and read it more thoroughly a bit later, go through their emails again to sort or archive them, or close their email client and reopen it while your newsletter was still selected.
Laposta automatically filters out opens and clicks that occur in very quick succession.
Dozens or hundreds of opens from a single address
Sometimes the number increases much further. Usually, this is caused by software that automatically scans incoming email for malicious content and loads the images in your newsletter in the process. It is not always possible to determine why this happens so often with one address and not with another.
Laposta tries to keep these automated actions out of the statistics as much as possible, but no filter can recognise them all. These same scanners also cause clicks that do not come from a reader. You can read how Laposta assesses these under Bot filter for scanner clicks.
If, on the other hand, you see remarkably few repeated opens for an address, this is often down to the email provider itself. With Gmail addresses, nothing is usually recorded after the first open. You can read why this happens under Open rate with Gmail.