SFMC Activity Record for Sent exists, and a related Click Activity Exists, but no Open Activity

Question

I'm conducting reporting and I'm finding that there a few thousand records that have a click activity but no correlated open event.

I'm matching based on jobid, batchid, subscriberkey for _Sent, _Open, and _Click. I'm processing this data external to SFMC, and if I just do a search for an individual record in each data view based on say Jobid and subscriberkey only, I'll see it in Sent and in Click, but not Open (it doesn't exist at all). So I know it's not a problem with my queries. I've noticed this behaviour across different BUs that I've worked with and can't seem to figure out why this is so.

I tried checking that entire jobid too, to see if tracking happened to be off for that send, but that's not the case. Any other reason to explain this behaviour?

Otherwise, I have written a query to assume that there is implied Open behaviour.

Answer 1

Some email tools consider each click an "implicit open". If you are seeing clicks for a user without an opening, Marketing Cloud does not do this. Your query that mimics such behavior would be a good solution then. I have not confirmed the behavior inside SFMC myself, but technically, a click without an opening is completely plausible:

An opening is registered when the images inside the email are loaded in the recipients' inbox, as the opening tracking pixel (a 1x1 px sized image) is one of them. The marketing cloud servers understand when the opening tracking Pixel image inside the email is loaded from an email and register this event as an opening.

There could be different root causes why no such opening is registered:

a) Email clients which by default block all images (think Outlook, but also others) do this exactly to prevent such tracking mechanisms, so people clicking from an email inside their Outlook inbox without loading the images might only register clicks*.

b) Maybe some emails could not have contained an opening pixel by mistake? It is an optional inclusion in emails, after all.

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*Click tracking works completely differently and independently from opening tracking, by routing all clicked links over the marketing cloud servers before redirecting to the "actual URL". There is no connection to the tracking pixel image being loaded here.

Hope this helps!