All You Need to Know About the Privacy Protection Feature

The Privacy Protection settings enable you to adjust the recipient activity logging for each channel according to your internal requirements. You can choose between four different levels of monitoring per channel:

1. Full monitoring (default)
2. Monitor unique information for reporting
3. Anonymous 
4. Disabled

Because the settings are per channel, this allows you to disable monitoring on the "Transactional Email" channel, while retaining it for the "marketing" email channel.

These settings solely affect monitoring that Agillic automatically puts in place. For example, when creating an external link in the email editor, or when recording opens of an email. You recognise an automatically created Event by its name, which consists of "Event" followed by a space and a timestamp (e.g., Event 230814 125206 9).

On the other hand, events that you manually create will always log interactions with recipients, since they are usually tied to internal business processes (e.g. unsubscribe). This means that if you want to have side effects on events or actively use them in conditions (e.g. event count), you should manually name them.

Full monitoring

Agillic identifies recipients' individual clicks on links & opens. This is how interactions are recorded per default, making them visible in Reports, Activity Exports and the Recipient Investigation.

Monitor unique information for reporting

The recorded information is detached from the individual recipient. This means that your reports will show the correct amount of (unique) clicks and (unique) opens for each single send-out. However, ties to the recipient are removed. This means that click and open actions are shown with blank recipient IDs in the Activity Export and are hidden from the Recipient Investigation.

Anonymous 

You will be able to see the total amount of clicks and opens, but all unique recipient interactions are counted as if made by one constructed recipient. This means that unique clicks and opens will become inaccurate. Activity exports and Recipient Investigation behave as for "Monitor unique information for reporting".

Disabled

Agillic stops recording any click or open interactions from recipients. No recordings are shown in the Activity Export.

Changes to these settings will instantly apply, however, depending on the chosen monitoring level, the affected communications differ. This is where the "Disabled" level stands out, since it affects all clicks and opens of the respective channel from the moment of the change. For example, if you disable monitoring for the email channel, and you just had an email campaign executed one hour before, no new monitoring from that moment on regarding clicks and opens (that Agillic automatically put in place) will be recorded anymore. In contrast, changes to the remaining monitoring levels will only affect interactions that are part of send-outs performed after switching the settings.

Implications:

• Inactive Emails will only be automatically assessed with "Full monitoring". 
• Subject Line Tests will only output a correct result in combination with "Full monitoring". All other levels will skip the test. 
• Conditions restricting a report on the activity (clicks, opens, etc.) will only output the correct results with "Full monitoring".
• Autogenerated events cannot be used in "Event" conditions
  • e.g., Event - Event 230814 125206 9 - greater than x - condition met
• Autogenerated events cannot be found in the Data Module/Events section
• The "achieved counter" for an autogenerated event will never be more than "1" (example below)

Example below:

Multiple activations of the same event (autogenerated). The counter remains at 1.

The table below illustrates how the different settings' levels will impact reporting. Keep in mind that these settings can be configured independently for each channel (e.g. "Transactional" - no monitoring, "Marketing" - full monitoring).

*in some cases, the reported number of "Opens" can be higher than the number of delivered Emails.

How to activate:

1. Log in on the Staging environment.
2. Open the Settings module by selecting the settings icon in the top right corner of the screen.
3. Under the System Settings section in the left sidebar, select Privacy Protection.
4. Select the desired monitoring level for each channel
5. Click the Save button.

Note: We recommend a full publish if you also wish to change the monitoring of items that have last been published before the upgrade to 23.3.

Reporter Module

If you choose to opt-in to any of the Privacy Protection levels lower than "Full monitoring", you will notice a few changes to the reporting in Bar Chart and Table View mode. We will cover those changes here.

The Bar Chart representation of an email report will display data for the given email and period.

The Table View performs more advanced filtering (such as looking at unique recipients), which also means it will display lower numbers on settings below "Full monitoring", as the data needed for the filtering is unavailable on the more restrictive privacy protection levels.

Examples

Example: Privacy Protection is set to "Monitor Unique"

1 email is sent to 11 unique recipients.

Reporter

• 2 of those have clicked a link with a "named" event (the table view)
• 7 of those have clicked a link with a "named", or autogenerated event (bar chart)

Example: Privacy Protection is set to "Anonymous"

1 email is sent to 11 unique recipients.

• 4 of those have clicked a link with a "named" event (the table view)
• 5 of those have clicked a link with a "named", or autogenerated event (bar chart)

Notice that "Opened" and "Clicked unique" remain at 1 as we are unable to distinguish between unique recipients on the "Anonymous" level.

Activity Export (shortened)

Below is a shortened example of an Activity Export for the "Anonymous" level. Notice that the "ID" column is empty for activations of autogenerated events.