Tracker

Tracker - tracker.cgi
User Guide
- Birds-Eye View
- Individual Messages/Campaigns
Installing tracker.cgi
- List Control Panel Menu
Specific Plugin Config Variables
Compatibility with clickthrough_tracking.cgi
COPYRIGHT

Tracker - tracker.cgi

The Tracker plugin creates analytic reports of activity of your mass mailings. You can think of a mass mailing being a campaign if you'd like and the Tracker plugin being what presents data on your campaign.

The activities that are logged and reported include:

# subscribers when a mass mailing was sent out
# of recorded clickthroughs
# of recorded opens/views
# of unsubscribes
# bounces, both soft and hard

User Guide

For a guide on using Tracker, see the Dada Mail Manual:

http://dadamailproject.com/pro_dada/using_tracker.html

For more information on Pro Dada/Dada Mail Manual:

http://dadamailproject.com/purchase/pro.html

Birds-Eye View

These reports include the above information in tabular data, as well as in a line graph, for past mass mailings to help you spot general trends. This information can also be exported into .csv files, giving you more flexibility, specific to your needs.

Individual Messages/Campaigns

Along with the birds-eye view of seeing data of many messages at once, each mass mailing/campaign can also be explored.

Clickthroughs are broken down per # of clicks per link
Clickthroughs are also broken down by country of origin, displayed in both a table and map.
Message opens are also broken down by country of origin and displayed both in a table and map.
Bounces, both soft and hard bounces are listed by date and email address of the bouncee.

Clicking on the email address will allow you to view the data about the bounced message itself in the bounce handler plugin.

(No bounces will be recorded, unless you've separately set up and installed the Bounce Handler plugin that comes with Dada Mail)

If you suddenly get a ton of bounced messages for a mailing from addresses you know look legitimate, there's a good chance that something seriously went wrong in the delivery part of a mass mailing. The reports that the Tracker plugin links to may help in resolving this problem.

All this message-specific data can also be exported via .csv files that may be downloaded.

What's below will go into installing the plugin and advanced configuration.

Installing tracker.cgi

This plugin can be installed during a Dada Mail install/upgrade, using the included installer that comes with Dada Mail. The below installation instructions go through how to install the plugin manually.

The tracker.cgi plugin comes with Dada Mail. You'll find it in the, dada/plugins directory with the file name, tracker.cgi

Change its permission to, 755.

Now, edit your .dada_config file, so that it shows the Tracker in the left-hand menu, under the, Plugins heading:

First, see if the following lines are present in your .dada_config file:

 # start cut for list control panel menu
 =cut

 =cut
 # end cut for list control panel menu

If they are, remove them.

Then, find these lines:

 #                                      {
 #                                      -Title      => 'Tracker',
 #                                      -Title_URL  => $PLUGIN_URL."/tracker.cgi",
 #                                      -Function   => 'tracker',
 #                                      -Activated  => 1,
 #                                      },

Uncomment the lines, by taking off the, "#"'s:

                                        {
                                        -Title      => 'Tracker',
                                        -Title_URL  => $PLUGIN_URL."/tracker.cgi",
                                        -Function   => 'tracker',
                                        -Activated  => 1,
                                        },

Save your .dada_config file.

Specific Plugin Config Variables

These variables have defaults saved in this plugin itself, but encourage you to reset the defaults to the values you may want, instead in your .dada_config file, in the, $PLUGIN_CONFIGS variable, under the, Tracker entry

Plugin_Name

The name of this plugin

Plugin_URL

The URL of this plugin. This is usually found by default, but sometimes the default doesn't work correctly. If this happens to you, fill it out in this variable

GeoIP_Db

This variable holds the file path to the location ofthe GeoIP database. The GeoIP database is a IP Address -> Location lookup table, to quickly and easily figure out the location based on the IP Address.

This database is updated monthly and new copies can be obtained at:

http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCountry/GeoIP.dat.gz

The database is licensed under the LGPL, so it's OK to ship Dada Mail with a copy of this database.

If you find it necessary, you may keep a copy of this database outside of Dada Mail and update it regularly and tell this plugin where to find the database to use.

For more information, see:

http://search.cpan.org/~borisz/Geo-IP-PurePerl-1.25/lib/Geo/IP/PurePerl.pm

This product includes GeoLite data created by MaxMind, available "/www.maxmind.com/" in from http:

GeoLiteCity_Db

Like, GeoIP_Db, this variables holds the absolute file path to the City Geo IP database. Copies are obtained from,

http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.xz

Compatibility with clickthrough_tracking.cgi

The previous iteration of this plugin (tracker.cgi) was called, clickthrough_tracker.cgi. Do not use this old plugin with anything newer than v4.5.0 of Dada Mail. It will not work correctly.

Backwards Compatibility with the [redirect=] tag

Past versions of Dada Mail (before v4.5.0) used a different syntax for redirect URLs. The syntax looked like this:

 [redirect=http://example.com]

This tag format is still supported, but consider it deprecated.

Limitations of Redirect tags

One thing that you cannot do with the redirect tags, is embedd other Dada Mail Template Tags within the redirect tag.

This will not work:

 <?dada redirect url="http://example.com/index.html?email=<!-- tmpl_var subscriber.email -->" ?>

Upgrade Notes

The below is information for people who have used the clickthrough_tracking.cgi script in past versions of Dada Mail (before v4.5.0) and want to take advantage of the new Tracker plugin and also want to move over the old logged data.

Importing Old Clickthrough Logs

Data saved within the older, PlainText clickthrough logs would have to be moved over,

There is a script called, dada_clickthrough_plaintext_to_sql.pl located in the, dada/extras/scripts directory that will do this conversion. Move it into your, dada directory, change its permissions to, 755 and run it once in your web browser. It may take a few minutes to run to completion.

COPYRIGHT

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.