This article is for general informational purposes and isn't legal advice.

As the sender, you remain responsible for your own compliance. We advise you to work with your legal or privacy team to confirm how these requirements apply to your marketing communications.

Open tracking measures how many contacts open your email campaigns. It relies on a tracking pixel, which is a small, invisible image added to each email you send. Open tracking consent is stored against each contact, and either you or the contact can change it.

Some EU regulators, including France's data protection authority (the CNIL) and Italy's data protection authority (the Garante), have published guidance on consent for tracking pixels in email. Their guidance treats consent to receive marketing email as separate from consent to open tracking. Whether and how it applies to you is a decision for you and your privacy team.

About open tracking consent

Consent to receive your marketing email isn't the same as consent to have opens tracked. Some regulators treat open tracking as a separate activity that needs its own consent, and an easy way to withdraw it.

Each contact has one of three open tracking consent statuses:

Status	What it means	Tracking pixel
Opted in	The contact has agreed to open tracking	Added
Opted out	The contact has declined open tracking	Not added
Not set	No consent decision has been recorded	Added

All contacts start as Not set. Not set isn't consent. It records that the contact hasn't made a decision, and it keeps your existing tracking behaviour in place when you turn the setting on.

Because Not set contacts are still tracked, turning the setting on doesn't change anything by itself. You know your audience, so you decide which contacts to opt out.

When the setting is off, open tracking consent isn't applied, so all your campaigns include a tracking pixel as normal. You need the setting on to add a consent link to a campaign. If you turn the setting off afterwards, any links you've already sent keep working. Dotdigital still stores each contact's preference, and those preferences take effect again when you turn the setting back on.

There are three ways to set a contact's open tracking consent:

The contact opts in or out themselves, using a link in one of your campaigns.
You opt contacts in or out in bulk, using a segment.
You set it through the API, for example when you collect a contact.

Open tracking consent isn't captured by your sign-up channels

Sign-up forms, landing pages, and integrations don't set it, so contacts from those routes arrive as Not set, which means their campaigns include a tracking pixel. If you collect consent at sign-up, set it using the API as you create the contact. Otherwise you need to opt out the ones who didn't consent, in bulk using a segment.

Enable open tracking consent for your account

Select the Account menu icon, then go to Settings > General > Account settings.
Under Email regulatory settings, for Enable open tracking consent, select Yes.
Select Save settings.

Once this setting is enabled, you can add an Open tracking opt-out link to your campaigns, and update open tracking consent in bulk for your segments.

Opt out the contacts who need it

Turning the setting on doesn't change how your campaigns are tracked. Every contact starts as Not set, and Not set contacts are still tracked, so nothing changes until you opt contacts out or they opt themselves out.

If you send to contacts in countries where open tracking needs separate consent, and you don't already have that consent, opt those contacts out when you turn the setting on. Create a segment of the contacts you want to opt out, for example your contacts in France and Italy, then update their consent in bulk.

Add an open tracking consent link to a campaign

Your contacts need a way to change their own consent. Add a tracking pixel opt-out link to your campaign, which takes them to their preference page.

In your campaign or template, select the text you want to turn into a link, then expand the link type menu to open the Add a link dialog.
Select Open tracking opt-out.
For Text, enter the wording your contacts select to open their preference page.
Optionally, for Link title, enter a title.
Select Insert.

Place your link in your footer, alongside your unsubscribe link.

Update open tracking consent in bulk

Bulk updates are good for contacts you've already identified. For example, you can create a segment of your contacts in France, then opt that whole segment out in one action.

Before you start

To update consent in bulk, you need a segment containing the contacts you want to update.
To target a specific market by location, your contacts need country or region data stored against them. If you already keep that audience separately, in its own account or list, you can segment on that instead.

In Marketing, create a segment of the contacts you want to update.
Go to Audience > Segments, then select each segment you want to update.
Expand MORE ACTIONS, then select Update open tracking consent.
Choose Opt out to stop tracking pixels being added to your email campaigns, or Opt in to allow them.
Select Update consent.

Set open tracking consent using the API

Open tracking consent is stored on the contact's email channel properties as openTracking. You can read it when you get a contact, and set it when you create, replace, import, or patch one.

In Marketing	API value
Opted in	`subscribed`
Opted out	`unsubscribed`
Not set	`unknown`

{
  "channelProperties": {
    "email": {
      "openTracking": "unsubscribed"
    }
  }
}

You can set openTracking through the API whether or not open tracking consent is enabled on the account. While the setting is off, the value is stored but not applied, so campaigns still include a tracking pixel. It takes effect when you turn the setting on.

Learn more in the contacts API reference.

What to expect when contacts opt out

When a contact opts out, the campaigns you send afterwards don't include a tracking pixel for them, so they record no new opens.

This also covers campaigns you'd already sent. Those emails still contain the contact's tracking pixel, but reopening one of them doesn't register an open.

Opting out doesn't delete the open data already collected for that contact. It stays in your account, and you can still use it in reports, segments, and programs.

Clicks are still tracked. Opting out of open tracking doesn't affect click tracking. Clicks from an opted-out contact are still recorded, and you can still use them in reports, segments, and programs. What changes is that a click no longer registers an open as well.

Contacts who opt out register no opens from new campaigns. Your open rates fall as a result, and these contacts can appear unengaged in your reports and segments.

Anything that depends on open data is affected for these contacts, including:

Engagement-based segments and engagement reporting
ReMail, which resends to contacts who didn't open
Programs using an open as a condition or a decision

This setting doesn't affect link tracking or unsubscribes.

View a contact's open tracking consent history

Each time a contact changes their open tracking consent using the link in one of your campaigns or if you bulk update using a segment, Dotdigital logs a record in an insight data collection called ConsentInsight_OpenTracking. The consent text records what changed: either "Opted IN to open tracking" or "Opted OUT of open tracking".

Consent set through the API isn't logged in this collection. If you set consent through the API, keep your own record of it.

These records use the same fields as ConsentInsight records. Learn more in Record consent for your contacts.

To see a contact's records, go to the Insight data tab on the Single customer view and select the ConsentInsight_OpenTracking collection. Learn more in View a contact's Insight data.

An absent record means the contact's open tracking consent has never been changed from the account default of Not set. It isn't a record of consent. To demonstrate that a contact consented to open tracking, you need a record of their own opt-in.

Unlike ConsentInsight records, ConsentInsight_OpenTracking records aren't included when you export a contact.

Manage open tracking consent for contacts