Open alerts
Send a proposal, a pitch deck or a shared file as a tracked link and get an email when it is opened: when, the city and country, the device and browser, and where the click came from. Alerts are off for every link until you turn one on.
Turn on an alert
- Open Alerts in the sidebar and click New alert
- Pick the link
- Choose a rule: On every open, or Every N clicks
- Click Save alert
From a link's own page, the menu has Email me when opened, which opens the same form with that link already picked. One alert per link; edit it to change the rule, or use its switch to pause it.
Which rule to use
| Rule | Use it for |
|---|---|
| On every open | A link you sent to one person or one team: a proposal, a quote, a contract, a CV, a listing. Each open is one email. |
| Every N clicks | A link shared widely: a post, a newsletter, a QR code on a poster. Set N between 2 and 100,000 and you hear about traffic without an email per click. |
Plans and limits
Open alerts are part of Agency ($49/mo) and Business ($149.99/mo).
- 50 alert emails a month on Agency, 200 on Business, across all your links. The count resets on the 1st (UTC).
- A single link sends at most 6 alert emails an hour. If a link is opened more often than that, the extra opens are still recorded.
- When the month's emails run out you get one email saying so, and alerts stay quiet until the 1st. Every open is still counted in your analytics.
- Alerts count against the plan of the workspace that owns the link. In a workspace, the email goes to the member who turned the alert on.
What counts as an open
An open is a click that would show up as a human visit in your analytics. These never send an alert:
- Link previews from Slack, WhatsApp, iMessage, LinkedIn and other apps
- Search engine crawlers and known bots
- Traffic from cloud servers (AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr), where scrapers and many link scanners run
Some company email systems, Microsoft's Safe Links among them, open every link in an incoming message to check it before your recipient sees it. Those checks can come from addresses we can't tell apart from a person, so they can send an alert. An open within seconds of your email arriving is most likely a scanner; the next one is usually your recipient.
On a pixel, an "open" is the image loading. Some mail apps load images as a message arrives, so a pixel alert can be the mail app rather than a person. For a document, use a link.
What the email shows
- The link's name, its short URL and where it goes
- When it was opened (UTC)
- City and country, from the visitor's IP address
- Device, operating system and browser
- The referring site, if there was one
- How many opens the link has had so far
Location from an IP address is usually right at the country level and close at the city level; a VPN or a corporate network can place a visitor somewhere else. If you need a precise position, and the visitor agrees to share it, see Pinpoint links.
Alerts in your own systems
Alerts are for a person reading their inbox. To push every click into a CRM, Slack or your own code, use webhooks instead: they fire on every click and don't count against the alert limit.