Quick answer: HubSpot tracks email opens by embedding an invisible one-pixel image in every email and tracks clicks by rewriting your links to route through its servers before redirecting to the destination. Open rates are no longer fully reliable — Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches tracking pixels in the background, so click-through rate is now the stronger engagement metric.
HubSpot email tracking metrics are critical for understanding how effective your email is (or isn’t). Specifically, we’re talking about the big three:
- Delivery Rate. The number of contacts that could simply have email delivered to their inbox. Emails that can’t be delivered could not have been delivered for a variety of reasons.
- Open Rate. Metric used to gauge how effective the email is—emails with higher open rates are literally read more. Can also be a good sign of overall subscriber health and engagement.
- Click-Through Rate. Another engagement metric used to describe how well your offer, pitch, whatever is resonating with your customer.
Before we get into more detail, let's break down some terminology.
What is HubSpot Email Tracking?
Email tracking is the process of using a third party software to gather data about how your recipients interact with your emails. This data is used to improve your marketing strategy, conversion rate, and relationship with the recipient. A typical email tracking tool, like HubSpot, captures open rate, time, location, and click through data.
This guide will walk you through everything you’ve ever needed to know about HubSpot email tracking, from the differences between email tracking and email logging, the different kinds of emails you can use, how to optimize your email marketing, and more.
What's the Difference Between Email Tracking vs Email Logging?
HubSpot email tracking lets you monitor when your contacts open and interact with different parts of your email.
On the other hand, a log lets you get a copy of an email. This feature is used to keep track of past communications. Logged one-to-one emails won't give you insight into click or open information but you can get the specs on attachments included in the email.
Free Email Tracking
If you're not ready to fully commit to a HubSpot subscription, you can try HubSpot email tracking for free—it's included in HubSpot's CRM platform
This is the ideal solution for small businesses or if your team is on a tight budget. HubSpot's premium plans do include additional features and allow you more flexibility and in-depth insights, but their free plan is more than enough for you to determine if the investment is worthwhile.
Email Types in HubSpot
Just a side note: there are different types of email on HubSpot (in terms of purpose)
| Email Type | Tracking Available | Primary Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Sales Emails | Opens + clicks (click tracking requires a paid Sales Hub seat) | 1:1 outreach, sequences, real-time follow-up notifications |
| Marketing Emails | Opens + clicks (tracked by default) | Broadcasts, nurture workflows, A/B testing, behavioral scoring |
| Transactional Emails | Limited | Order confirmations, password resets, system notifications |
| Service Hub Emails | Opens + clicks | Support tickets, shared inbox threads, customer follow-ups |
In this particular case, we’re only concerned with the first two: marketing and sales emails. That’s because the context in which you’ll want to know opens and clicks are usually in a sales or marketing context.
HubSpot Email Tracking Explained: Open Rates
HubSpot email tracking works similarly to most email tracking: the use of an invisible, single-pixel image. Here’s how it works:
- You send an email to your contacts in HubSpot.
- When your contact opens the email, they download that small image.
- HubSpot tracks that image download, which in turn counts as an email “open".
Generally speaking, this system works pretty well—you can be confident of using the data that HubSpot reports for open rate as compared to other email platforms you’ve used.
In reality, most email platforms use a similar system of single-pixel image downloads to determine open rates.
Does Open Rate Tracking Ever Fail?
The above scenario is how email tracking is intended work, but things don’t always go according to plan. HubSpot specifically cites a few situations where that tracking pixel (and thus HubSpot tracking) can become deactivated:
- The recipient formats their email in plain text.
- The recipient's email client doesn't automatically download images.
- The recipient's corporate filter strips away all images for incoming emails.
Other situations (like aggressive spam filters that block images) could also cause issues, but, again, because most email service providers fundamentally use this method for open rate tracking — you can for sure have a reasonable amount of confidence in these numbers.
Why Open Rate Matters in HubSpot
You might be asking what the relevance of open rates are. The answer is that open rates are important on any email service provider: they tell how engaged (or not engaged) your contact is with your email.
Another important consideration is that people can’t click email links without opening the email. Opens (and by extension open rates) are, in a way, the basis for all your other engagement metrics.
In thinking about how to optimize your email in HubSpot, open rate is often determined by subject line. Want to improve your open rate? Start with A/B testing various subject lines to see if you can create a better result.
Why Your Open Rates Might Be Wrong
The tracking pixel system works reliably for most Gmail and Outlook users, but two developments have changed the math.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Since iOS 15 (late 2021), Apple Mail pre-fetches all email content — including tracking pixels — through Apple's proxy servers, regardless of whether the recipient ever opens the email. HubSpot recognizes these proxy IP ranges and filters them out of your marketing reports by default (this is the "bot filtering" setting under Marketing > Email). That means you don't get inflated numbers, but you do get zero open data for your Apple Mail contacts. If 40–50% of your list uses Apple Mail, your visible open rate drops by that same percentage—even if real engagement hasn't changed.
Corporate security scanners. Enterprise email gateways like Mimecast, Proofpoint, and Barracuda intercept incoming emails in a sandbox before they reach the recipient's inbox. To check for malware, the scanner loads every image (triggering your open pixel) and clicks every link (triggering your click tracking). From HubSpot's perspective, this looks like a prospect who opened your email and clicked every link within seconds of delivery. HubSpot's marketing analytics catch some of this, but on 1:1 sales emails, these false positives still show up as real engagement.
What to do about it. Treat open rates as directional — useful for spotting trends over time, not as absolute truth. Build your reporting and automation triggers around click-through rate, replies, and conversion actions instead. If you're seeing suspiciously high engagement immediately after sending, it's almost certainly a security scanner, not a hot lead.
HubSpot Email Reporting Options
While there is a slew of reporting options available in HubSpot, you’ll likely be looking at one of three places:
Contact Records and Activity
The easiest go-to place to figure out what is happening with a particular contact is on the contact record. Here you’ll also see whether contacts have opened a particular email, clicked on any links, etc.
Emails
Obviously, you’ll often want to review each individual email you send for performance by way of open rate or click-through rate. These metrics fluctuate based on a particular email send, time of day, offer, and well, everything else under the sun.
Remember, there are effectively different types of emails that HubSpot’s platform uses, so you can get these metrics on everything from regular marketing emails to automated emails triggered by workflows.
Analysis
The email section of HubSpot also has a tab for Analysis, which gives you an easy way to aggregate all your email performance metrics into a single, unified chart. It gives you a quick-and-dirty look at open rates and click-through rates.
Why Bother Tracking HubSpot Emails
There are a couple of reasons why you’d want to dig into these metrics in HubSpot and both will enable you to make more leads and closed won deals.
At the core of email tracking is the goal to improve performance. Delivery rates, open rates, and click-through rates give you a feedback loop on what's resonating and what isn't — and over time, that loop compounds into better subject lines, better offers, and better timing.
Insights Into Your Audience
Whether it’s a sales or marketing email, opens and clicks are the heart of email performance metrics for a reason. They translate the abstract idea of “engagement” into neat, reliable metrics that can be helpful for:
- Knowing which of your contacts are engaged with your content
- Knowing which proposals might turn into closed won deals
- Learning how effective your emails are
- Extrapolating which offers and messages resonate with your audience
For example, say you get multiple opens on a tracked email. This can happen when the receiver forwards the email or if you have copied and pasted a previously sent email. To ensure privacy and security, HubSpot reports will then mark when the email is opened more than once.
How HubSpot Tracks Clicks
Clicks are another important email engagement metric that likely matters to you. Again, remember you can’t have a click unless someone opens your email to begin with. In some ways, clicks can be seen as a deeper engagement metric—getting someone to open an email is an accomplishment, but getting them to click and go-to something is often the real goal.
Why Clicks & Click-Through Rate Are So Important
While clicks are the number of people that clicked on any link in your email, click-through rate is simply the number of contacts that clicked on a link divided by the total contacts sent that email.
How HubSpot Click Tracking Works
Click tracking works differently from open tracking. Instead of embedding an image, HubSpot rewrites every hyperlinked URL in your email to route through its own tracking servers (hubspotlinks.com by default). When a recipient clicks a link, their browser hits HubSpot's server first—which logs the click, the timestamp, and device data—then redirects them to the original destination in milliseconds. One thing to note: if a URL is typed as plain text in the email body but not hyperlinked, HubSpot can't track clicks on it. Only HTML hyperlinks get rewritten
Keep in Mind: If you have multiple links to the same destination, HubSpot will often report those clicks according to the destination URL (versus where a user actually clicked).
Using the HubSpot Extension for Link Tracking
Side Note: HubSpot recommends using their browser extension to get the latest alerts on what emails are opened.
Not only is the extension a great way to log notes and other details about your contacts, but you can also do some testing for click tracking (but largely you can trust the default setup out of HubSpot).
How to Integrate HubSpot Email Tracking
HubSpot's email integration feature lets you connect your personal inbox to the HubSpot CRM, making it easy for you to keep pace with any work changes all from your personal device.
This integration means you can use your own inbox to:
- Trigger email campaigns.
- Log contact record information into the HubSpot CRM.
- Track open and engagement rates.
If you want to integrate HubSpot into your personal Gmail so you can stay in the loop even on your personal device, you’re in luck: this integration is really straightforward.
All you need to do is log into your HubSpot portal, navigate to the Settings icon in the upper right, select Integrations from the left menu drop-down, and then navigate to Email Integrations. Click Connect an Inbox and select your email provider.
From there, for example if you use Gmail, a window will appear and ask if you want to turn on inbox automation. You don't need to enable this to integrate your personal inbox. You'll then be prompted to log into your Gmail and be asked to grant access to HubSpot.
Once you allow this, HubSpot will redirect you to its Email Integrations page. If this part is giving you trouble, just reload the page.
You can now log and track emails through your Gmail inbox and you don't have to worry about the hassle of logging into HubSpot.
Get More From Your HubSpot Emails
Open rates only tell part of the story. Our free guide covers segmentation, personalization, A/B testing, deliverability, and the metrics that actually tie back to revenue—all inside HubSpot.
Download the Guide
How to Optimize Your HubSpot Email Tracking
The real power behind these metrics is to make a transformational shift in your marketing and sales operations. Some emails are more effective towards accomplishing your goals versus others.
However, especially at the start of your email marketing campaigns, the why in the sentence “why is this email better than others” is often ambiguous.
But some starting points do exist:
Time and Time of Day
Time and time of day are huge factors for open rates and click-through rates. Generally speaking, people avoid sending emails on the weekend for any type of demand generation or business-to-business marketing. Also, you wouldn’t want to send an email when your contacts would be least likely to open them, so avoiding hours when people are often sleeping is helpful.
Subject Line
Subject lines are a huge factor that affects open rates. Since subject lines orient the reader to what your email is about, it’s a huge factor for determining whether someone wants to read your email (or not).
Images, CTRs, and Links
The clickable elements in your email are, not surprisingly, a big factor for determining whether someone makes a click. Our recommendation: make as many clickable elements as possible —the more physical space your links occupy, the likelihood that one of them will be clicked increases.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is a powerful tool in HubSpot that can greatly impact the performance of your email marketing campaigns. By testing different subject lines, images, call-to-action buttons, and other elements, you can gather valuable insights into what resonates best with your audience. This data allows you to make informed decisions on how to optimize your emails for better open and click-through rates.
Authentication Settings
As of February 2024, there are some specific email authentication settings that users will need to adapt their HubSpot to that can also significantly affect deliverability.
While these changes affect any bulk email senders, HubSpot users need to verify they have the correct authentication settings setup for email to ensure correct deliverability.
Custom Tracking Domains
By default, HubSpot rewrites your email links to route through hubspotlinks.com. The problem: an email sent from @yourcompany.com containing links to hubspotlinks.com looks structurally identical to a phishing email — and aggressive spam filters treat it that way.
If you're on Sales Hub or Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise, set up a custom tracking domain (e.g., click.yourcompany.com) by adding a CNAME record in your DNS that points to HubSpot's tracking servers. This aligns your sender domain with your link domain, which does two things: it reduces the chance spam filters quarantine your emails, and it builds trust when recipients hover over a link and see your domain instead of a third-party URL.
Why Analyze & Optimize HubSpot Email Tracking
Email tracking isn't a set-it-and-forget-it feature—it's a feedback loop. The teams that get the most out of it are the ones who actually look at the data, test against it, and adjust. If you're not regularly reviewing which emails drive clicks (not just opens), you're leaving revenue on the table.
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