Review: 6 Chrome extensions let you track your Gmail
If you're a Gmail user, you already know that Google's service doesn't have email tracking. But if you use it through the Chrome browser, there are several services that can track your sent emails.
For this roundup, I chose the six that, according to the Chrome Web Store, have the highest number of users: Bananatag, Boomerang, Mail2Cloud, MailTrack, Sidekick and Yesware.
Most of these services include tracking as part of a larger suite of enhanced email functions. For example, some also let you schedule an email to be sent automatically on a date and time of your choice. Another popular feature lets you hide a received email until a speciIfic date and time (when you're better able to deal with it). Many of these services can also tell you if the recipient clicked a link that you put into the email.
(Keep in mind that, with the exception of Boomerang, none of these services informs your recipients that their email is being tracked -- in other words, they won't know that every time they click a link from that email, you're going to know about it. It's up to you to tell them -- or not.)
For this article, I've focused mainly on these services' tracking capabilities: What features do you get for free and what more do you get when you pay for a premium plan How well does the service's Chrome extension integrate with the Gmail user interface How will the service notify you when the recipient has opened your tracked email
And finally, is this the type of service to consider if you only need to send a tracked email occasionally Or might it be useful if you need to track the response rates of a group of emails in greater detail, such as through a chart Let's see what each service offers.
In addition to its Chrome extension, Bananatag also has an add-on for Outlook, and can work with other email client programs (which are configured to route email through the Bananatag SMTP servers). Along with tracking whenever a recipient opens your email, Bananatag can also keep count of the times a link inside your tracked email has been clicked. This service includes send-later, remind-later and send-recurring email functions.
Bananatag adds a toolbar below Gmail's email composition toolbar that includes a blue "Track Email" checkbox. Just click this to mark it with a check, and the email you're writing will then be tracked once you click "Send."
Bananatag will send you an email notifying you the first time (but only the first time) that your tracked email is opened, and will send separate email alerts each time the recipient clicks a link inside the track email.
Through your user account page on the Bananatag site, you can get a nice statistical view of your results, including charts that illustrate the rate at which your tracked emails are opened and links inside them are clicked over a customizable period of time.
Tracking is free for up to five emails per day. After that, Bananatag offers two paid plans. For $6.25/month, you can apply Bananatag's features to up to 100 emails per day, while $12.50 per month (per user) raises this to 200 emails per day and adds team management features. There is a separate version that tracks and reports on internal emails within organizations; pricing for that starts at $250 per month.
Subscribers also get more detailed information, including the geographic location (country, region, city) where the tracked email was opened or link was clicked and what kind of browser, device (i.e., computer or mobile) and OS was used.
Bananatag's functions integrate into the Gmail UI very well. The charts on your user account page can help you gauge how effectively an email campaign is going, especially if you need to track how often links are clicked in those emails. If you only need to send tracked emails occasionally, the five-emails-per-day limit for free accounts could be more than enough.
This extension is the most popular of those covered in this article, approaching one million users. I suspect that Boomerang may have gotten all this love for its send-later and remind-later features rather than its email tracking, which has fewer capabilities than some of the others here (such as Bananatag).
Boomerang appends a toolbar below Gmail's email composition window which includes an icon of a blue envelope with a question mark. Click it, and the following is appended to your email: "The sender has requested a read receipt. If you do not wish to provide one, click here." You cannot delete this notice (unless you decide not to track the email).
Like Bananatag, Boomerang will send you an email notifying you of the first time that your tracked email has been opened, but the service doesn't send you an email when a link inside your tracked email has been clicked. Instead, you need to check within Gmail -- Boomerang adds a status bar to the top of each tracked email that keeps an updated tally of the number of times the email has been opened and, if the email has a link inside it, how many times that link has been clicked.
As mentioned, this extension has extensive send-later and remind-later features. For example, your email can be set to remind-later if the recipient does not click on a link inside the email, or if they do not open your email -- in other words, if the reminder deadline passes, the email reappears in your Inbox as if it were forwarded back to you.
In addition, on your account page on the Boomerang site you can see a full list of all the emails you've set to be tracked, sent later and reminded of later. Details include how many times an email has been opened and the number of times any link inside it has been clicked.
Boomerang tracking services are free for ten emails per month. There is an Android app and a mobile-site version of Boomerang; however, they can only be used to send tracked emails with the paid version.
The three paid tiers start at $4.99 per month; for that amount, you can track an unlimited number of emails and add mobile access. For $14.99/month, you can track recurring messages from Gmail and Google Apps; while $49.99/month adds a variety of premium business features such as Salesforce integration.
Being able to see opened and link-click counts at the top of a tracked email without leaving your Gmail site is really convenient. Boomerang's limit of ten free tracked emails per month will only work if you need little more than infrequent, personal use. However, if you need to send a lot of tracked emails -- such as a mass email addressed to several hundred people -- then at $4.99 a month for an unlimited number of tracked emails, Boomerang looks like a great deal.
Mail2Cloud's most notable feature is that the files you attach to a tracked email can be set so that they can no longer be downloaded by the recipient after 1, 3, 7 or 30 days -- a handy feature for time-sensitive materials. The service also lets you convert an email to PDF (along with archiving whatever files are attached in their original format) and store it in Box, Dropbox, Google Drive or ShareFile.
The Mail2Cloud extension inserts an aqua-blue button bearing the service's logo to the immediate right of the "Send" button on Gmail's email composition toolbar. To set an email to be tracked, you write your email first and then click the button. A panel opens that lists functions that the Mail2Cloud service can apply to the email -- for example, to have the email tracked, you highlight Total Track, choose a time limit for how many days any files you attach can be downloaded, and then click the "Send" button.
The Mail2Cloud servers will then send you an email when the recipient opens your tracked email, when any link inside the email has been clicked (and it will give you the URL of the link) and when any attached file is downloaded. However, Mail2Cloud sends an email for only the first time that any one of these actions is done by the recipient.
On the Mail2Cloud site, you can access a list of all the times that your tracked email was opened, what city the recipient was in when they did so, what kind of device they used to access your email, what links in the email they clicked, and what attachments they downloaded.
Like Bananatag, Mail2Cloud also works with Outlook.
Mail2Cloud offers a 14-day free trial that lets you use all of its features. After the free trial period has expired, Mail2Cloud is available for $8/month for individuals. A business plan offers the same features at $5/user/ month for 3 to 99 users, and there is an Enterprise plan available for organizations with more than 100 users.
If you're sending a confidential business file and need to track and control its distribution, this is one option to consider. Only one other service I tested for this roundup, Yesware, tracks the status of attached files. Unfortunately, Mail2Cloud lacks a free option.
MailTrack lets you track an unlimited number of emails for free -- but there's an odd catch: Under a free account, tracking cannot be turned off.
With a free account, all emails you send are tracked; there's nothing else you need to do other than write and send your email as you normally would.
When the recipient opens your tracked email, a notification card pops up from the lower-right corner of your desktop, and will also appear among the cards listed in the Chrome Notifications panel. MailTrack will also notify you by email, if you set it to do this.
In the Gmail main screen, MailTrack also adds two checkmark icons to the left of the sender names in your email list. If the first checkmark is green, it means that the email was sent using MailTrack -- if it's gray, then it was sent without. (Since the option to turn off email tracking comes with the paid plan, in the free plan, the first checkmark will always been green.) The second checkmark turns green to indicate that the tracked email was opened. Hover the pointer over these two checkmarks when they're both green, and a small panel will pop open listing all instances of the email being opened, and what operating system the recipient used to open it.
Your account page on the MailTrack site lists all the tracked emails you've sent, if any have been opened and if so, how many times.
There's only one premium plan starting at $30 for six months and $48 for a year. MailTrack will then track when a link inside your tracked email is clicked, and provide you with a daily analytics report regarding the open and link-click rate of your tracked emails. You'll also be able to turn off email tracking, if you wish.
I love how this extension's checkmark indicators make it convenient to tell, at a glance, an email's tracking status without having to open the email or visiting your user page on the MailTrack site. The pop-up notification cards are also nice.
The real downside: It's a little weird and intrusive that you cannot switch tracking off under a free account. Not only does this raise potential personal privacy concerns, it could also be a problem if you need to send email to someone who uses email through a network or service that blocks tracked emails or flags them as spam.
Sidekick is the second most popular app in this article, with more than 500,000 users of its Chrome extension. It comes from HubSpot, an online marketing platform, whose email tracking is also available for Outlook and Apple Mail.
The Sidekick extension adds a checkbox to the right end of the email composition toolbar of Gmail. Clicking it will set the email you are writing to be tracked. Like MailTrack, a notification card will pop up from the lower-right corner of your desktop every time a tracked email is opened; you'll also get a notification in Chrome.
Sidekick also installs a button (showing its logo) on the upper-right of the Chrome browser itself. Whenever a tracked email is opened, a count number will appear over this button. Click it and a small panel pops open that lists the status of your tracked emails, each represented as a card. Clicking "Expand" on a particular card will make it expand downward to reveal a list of all the times that the tracked email has been opened by the recipient.
Your user account page on the Sidekick site shows your tracked emails listed as an "activity stream." Basically, these are the same cards that appear when you click the Sidekick icon button.
Interestingly, if you open your own sent email that you're tracking through Sidekick, you'll receive a notification for that as well. This actually has a useful purpose -- it is meant to alert you if someone may be accessing your personal account on Gmail and opening tracked emails in your Sent folder without your knowledge.
Sidekick can track link-clicks, but only if the links are set as hyperlinks in the text of your email -- unlike with most of the other services in this roundup, you can't just enter an URL (for example: www.computerworld.com) into the body of text. Once you've embedded the link, Sidekick will track the number of clicks to that link.
Free accounts are granted 200 notifications (for whenever a tracked mail is opened) per month. For $10 per month, the 200-notification limit is removed.
Compared to the other extensions in this roundup, Sidekick's extension modifies the original user interface of Gmail the least -- the only new element it adds to the email composition window is the aforementioned checkbox for activating tracking.
I liked the design of Sidekick's notification cards, and how you can use them to keep up with the status of your tracked emails without needing to visit your account page. In addition, the limit of 200 notifications means that most users will be able to keep to the free account, while business users can handle the reasonable $10 per month fee.
Yesware is geared toward the business user, as evidenced by its (for pay) reporting features for CRM and Salesforce accounts and its add-on for Outlook.
The Yesware extension inserts its own toolbar into Gmail's composition window; the toolbar includes a checkbox that lets you turn tracking on or off.
It adds another toolbar, called the Inbox Dashboard, to the main Gmail screen, above where your emails are listed. An Events button makes the toolbar expand down to show a list of when tracked emails have been opened and lets you turn off tracking if you wish. An Emails button shows you all the tracked emails you've sent and whether the recipient has opened an email, clicked a link inside it, or replied.
The Inbox Dashboard isn't integrated seamlessly; it operates like a separate utility that's laid over the original Gmail UI. In my testing, this toolbar took a couple of seconds to load after the main Gmail screen was fully loaded. You can switch off the Inbox Dashboard, but you then have to visit your account page on the Yesware site to follow the tracking statuses of your emails.
A notification card will pop up from the lower-right corner of your main desktop alerting you whenever a tracked email is opened, a link inside it has been clicked, or a file attached to it has been downloaded or opened. As with Sidekick, links inside your email must be set as hyperlinks if you want their clicks to be tracked.
You can turn off tracking for an email that you've already sent by opening it and clicking the "Tracking" button that appears on its upper-right corner.
The Web site has some interesting features as well. You can go to your account page to view a chart that graphs the number of times your tracked emails have been opened over the last 30 days. Below this is a list of your tracked emails and the current status of each (i.e., when it was last opened, a link inside it was clicked, and an attachment to it downloaded or opened).
Yesware's free account will track 100 events (such as openings and link-clicks) per month. There are also three paid plans.
The Pro plan ($12 per month per user) lets you send an unlimited number of tracked emails and adds the ability to schedule emails, to sync with CRMs, and to track attachments and presentations. You can also be informed of how many times a PowerPoint presentation has been viewed or downloaded. The Team plan ($20 per month per user) includes a variety of team features, while the Enterprise version ($40 per month per user) adds integration with Salesforce.
As with Mail2Cloud, Yesware's ability to track attachments could be helpful, if you're willing to pay for it. Yesware also has some excellent business features, such as the ability to track PowerPoint presentations. However, if you simply need to send a few emails to track, there are simpler options that don't clutter up your Gmail user interface quite as much.
If you only need to track when an email you send through Gmail is opened, and don't mind having to set the links you want to track in your emails as hyperlinks, Sidekick is a good bet because of its great notification-card user interface.
Bananatag and Boomerang also include free send-later and remind-later features, but Boomerang's remind-later functionality can be tied to a tracked email, a nice addition. On the other hand, Bananatag provides a chart on your account page illustrating the opened and link-click rates of your tracked emails for free. When you pay for Bananatag, you'll get info about the recipient's location and device. Boomerang doesn't provide this level of detail.
Need to track attachments in your emails That doesn't come free. The cheapest to consider is Mail2Cloud at $8 per month. It will keep an accounting of how many times your attachments are downloaded and let you set a shut-off date as well.
Finally, Yesware's plans offer a great many more details about how your recipient interacts with your attachments (although you can't set a date to prevent them from being downloaded), and offers a plethora of business features for both small organizations and enterprises.