Impressions / Click Statistics in Email ads

[JimCosgrove]

We've used Revive to serve ads in email for several years with success - my question relates to the statistics.  Anyone care to guess what percentage of impressions / clicks that Revive reports are from non-humans like Spam filters, virus scanners, firewalls, etc.?

Proof: One of the ad units has had no banners assigned in well over a year, but consistently reports ad impressions at a higher quantity than the number of email opens.  I'm assuming that fake impressions are recorded by Revive from spam filters before the email is even delivered to the user.  Can anyone confirm this?

Past 7 days stats from Mailchimp and Revive:

340,012 Successful email deliveries
166,893 Total email opens
366,865 ad impressions (ad unit that was filled 100%)
742 clicks (100% filled ad unit)
216,074 ad impressions (no banners assigned)
0 clicks (empty ad unit)
 

Our standard email tag looks like this:

<a href="http://revive.mydomainname.com/revive/www/delivery/ck.php?zoneid=60&amp;cb=01171117" target="_blank">
<img src="http://revive.mydomainname.com/revive/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=60&amp;cb=01171117"></a>

[ajotadmin]

Did you ever get an answer on this? I am having serious problems again with ad impressions / clicks on my email campaigns that are ridiculously high. 

[JimCosgrove]

Howdy - I never got a response from anyone in the group.  In the meantime, I've decided to dump Revive, and go back to having our ad ops person manually insert the graphics into the email template.  If the advertiser wants to track it, they'll have to give us a URL with their own tracking code.  We'll probably stick to selling the email ad spaces for weekly periods only (Monday-Sunday), so we only have to go in once a week to swap out the graphics.  The only thing we'll be able to give them (if they ask for it) is the number of email opens we had during the run of their campaign.  This really makes more sense for us - we also believe it will increase our open rate because there won't be any questionable ad server code to get flagged by email filters.  We expect to implement this within the next 30-60 days.  If I can help more, you can reach me at [email protected].

[andrewatfornax]

There's probably no real difference here in terms of over counting impressions that can happen with image-based delivery tags outside of emails, but I can't really say what's causing impressions to come in higher than your email open count. Perhaps it's that your email open count is low?

Regardless, the following may help: https://documentation.revive-adserver.com/display/DOCS/Impressions+are+Too+High