In the Device and Client tab of the Sent Message report, you can see the Device and Clients used by your contacts when they opened an email.
Every message sent containing HTML contains a tiny tracking pixel that loads on all HTML messages. When a contact opens their email message, this image loads in their browser and Act-On receives data from that request. Act-On gathers this data and then uses several third-party libraries to determine your contact's Device and Client.
Why does my Sent Message Report have Unknown Devices and Default Browser Clients?
Sometimes, Act-On is unable to identify this information and you will see these opens as Unknown Device or a Default Browser Client in your report.
There are several reasons this happens:
- The tracking pixel was downloaded via an image proxy (such as, Google Image Proxy)
- This may cause a high number of Unknown Devices in the report if your marketing list has a large number of contacts using Gmail (including G Suite for business), Yahoo Mail, and Apple Mail. Because the tracking pixel is loaded through a proxy service, we are unable to detect the device when your contact is using one of these mail clients.
- The tracking pixel was not downloaded, but the message has a clickthrough.
- This still counts as an open, but the device and client are unknown because the open was not detected.
- The Device and/or Client cannot be identified by our libraries.
- This can happen for many reasons, such as brand new tech devices that are not yet registered in the libraries we use.
- The tracking pixel was downloaded by a bot or a spam detector that is not an ignored IP.
- To reduce this activity in your reports, see our article here: Identifying False Positives in Email Clicks.