Email Tracking Consent

Purpose and Scope

Email Tracking Consent records whether a contact has agreed to have their email opens and clicks tracked. Engage then applies or suppresses tracking for that contact.

The value is stored as a profile attribute on the contact. Engage evaluates it at send-out, when it decides whether to include open and click tracking in the message for that recipient.

Background

Email tracking relies on two mechanisms: a pixel that registers an open, and rewritten links that register a click. Some markets treat both more strictly than others. In France and Italy, the supervisory authorities hold that this kind of tracking can require the recipient's prior consent, much like cookies.

Whether that applies to your sending depends on who you send to and on the legal basis you rely on. This page describes the tooling Mapp provides. Assessing your own obligations is your responsibility as the data controller.

Control Mechanism: the tracking_consent Attribute

The processing of email tracking for a contact is determined by the tracking_consent profile attribute. It supports four states.

Behaviour

For messages already sent before a contact declines, the links in those messages cannot be rewritten retroactively. However, when the contact clicks, if their consent is Denied or Withdrawn, the tracking is ignored, unless the message was sent with a Tracking Type that overrides consent handling.

Tracking Type

Tracking Type is a per-message setting in the message's sendout configuration, available on create and edit. When you send to a group, it sits under Advanced Options; when you save a prepared message, it sits directly in the configuration step. It determines how each recipient's tracking consent is applied to that message. The default is Normal Tracking, so existing messages and integrations behave exactly as before.

Warning

Tracking Type only takes effect when consent-aware outgoing tracking is active for your account. This is part of the standard Tracking Consent setup. If it is not active, consent handling is skipped entirely and messages are tracked with the real contact identifier, whichever option you select. The interface does not warn you about this. If you are unsure whether your account is set up for tracking consent, check with your CSM before relying on the anonymized option.

Selecting Force Full Tracking or Force Anonymized when denied or withdrawn is your decision, and you are responsible for having a lawful basis for it. Engage does not ask you to confirm that basis and does not assess it.

When to choose the anonymized option

Choose Force Anonymized when denied or withdrawn when you need campaign-level open and click statistics for your whole audience, but no recipient-specific identifier may leave the email. This is the situation Italian compliance requirements describe.

Choose Force Full Tracking only where you have a lawful basis for tracking every recipient individually and you need contact-level reporting, automations, or raw data events for those recipients. The anonymized option does not provide any of these for contacts who denied or withdrew consent.

Limits of the anonymized option

For contacts who denied or withdrew consent, an anonymized open or click:

• counts only towards aggregate message and campaign statistics and is not attributed to a contact

• does not appear in raw data events

• does not trigger automations

• is not available for DMP or Intelligence matching

• does not store the real contact identifier, the email address, or any stable per-contact identifier.

Clicks are redirected as usual, so the recipient experience is unchanged.

Note

Tracking Type can also be set through the API when you create or update a prepared message. See the API reference for the field name and values.

Responsibilities

Mapp provides the tooling: Engage stores the consent value you send and applies or suppresses tracking based on it. You own the data and the legal basis: Mapp stores exactly what you send and does not validate it, so the accuracy of the consent data and the lawfulness of any tracking you carry out are your responsibility as the data controller. Selecting a Tracking Type that overrides consent is a decision you make on your own; Engage does not ask you to confirm a lawful basis for it and does not assess one. If you are unsure whether or how this applies to your sending, consult your own data protection adviser.

Relationship to Anonymized Email Tracking

Engage also offers Anonymized Email Tracking, controlled by the DoNotTrack contact attribute. It serves a different purpose from tracking_consent: tracking_consent determines whether open and click tracking is included at all, while DoNotTrack determines whether that tracking, when it happens, is anonymized. To track a contact anonymously this way, set tracking_consent to granted and DoNotTrack to true. For how anonymization is processed, see Email Tracking – Identifiability Model.

Engage therefore has two different ways of anonymizing email tracking, and the difference between them matters:

Where a requirement is that no recipient-specific identifier may be contained in the tracking URLs delivered inside the email, only the message-level anonymized option meets it.

If tracking_consent is denied and the message uses Normal Tracking, no tracking takes place, regardless of the DoNotTrack setting.

Data Retention

Email open and click tracking data is retained for three calendar years from the point of collection. This is an existing, Engage-wide retention property and is not specific to this feature.

Withdrawing consent stops future tracking; it does not delete tracking data already collected, which is retained under the standard retention policy. If a contact exercises a data subject right such as deletion or anonymization, that is handled separately from consent withdrawal.

Related articles

• Email Tracking – Identifiability Model

• Opt-out Methods

• How-to: setting the tracking_consent attribute

• API reference: /contact/update