How to Build a Free Email Tracker Tool for Digital PR Outreach in Outlook

You send forty pitches on a Tuesday morning. By Thursday, two journalists have replied, and the other thirty-eight have told you nothing at all. Did anyone read them? Was it the subject line that failed, or the story underneath it?

We got tired of guessing, so we built something small to answer it. It adds a Track email button inside Outlook, records who opened each pitch and who clicked through to the data, and runs on your own Cloudflare account for nothing. You can download the whole thing at the bottom of this page and have it working in about ten minutes.

The demo below is the dashboard, loaded with sample data from a fictional campaign. Click a journalist to see their activity, or replay the morning and watch the opens arrive.

Why we built our own

There are good outreach platforms that do this. They tend to charge per seat per month, which adds up for a small team, and most of them are built for sales rather than press.

The thing that pushed us into building our own was what those tools quietly do to links. Nearly all of them count clicks by rewriting every link in your email so that it points at their domain first, then bounces the reader on to your page. For a sales team chasing demos, that works fine. In digital PR, it costs clients coverage value. A journalist who copies the link out of your pitch and into their article has just linked to a tracking company, and your client’s page gets nothing from a piece you earned. Let the subscription lapse a year later and the link inside that article stops working altogether.

Our version leaves your links alone and adds UTM tags to them instead, so the clicks show up in Google Analytics against the exact pitch that earned them. The link in the published article still points to your site. There is a redirect mode in there as well for internal sends, where nobody is going to publish anything, and you would rather see clicks in the dashboard. The toggle in the third panel above shows the difference.

What it actually does

• A Track email button in the Outlook compose window, which works in New Outlook and Outlook on the web, as well as the classic desktop app
• A private dashboard showing opens, open rate, clicks and a timeline for every pitch, with the time, rough location and mail client for each one
• Link tagging that keeps your backlinks pointing at your own site, with redirect tracking as an option
• Automatic exclusion of your own views, so checking your Sent folder never shows up as an open
• Everything stored in your Cloudflare account, which means no third party holds your media list

What it costs

Nothing, on Cloudflare’s free plan. That covers 100,000 requests a day, and a busy outreach week might use a few hundred. There is no card to add and no trial that expires. The only thing you need is a free Cloudflare account and Node.js on your machine for the setup step.

Download the kit

Inside the zip you will find the tracking service, the dashboard, the Outlook add-in, a setup script that does the Cloudflare work for you, and a short approval brief you can forward to IT if your company blocks custom add-ins. It is MIT licensed, so you can pull it apart and change it.

Setting it up

The setup script does the fiddly parts for you: it logs into Cloudflare, creates the database, deploys the tracker and writes your private dashboard link and password to a file. Here is each step with what you will actually see.

EMAIL TRACKER: YOUR PRIVATE DETAILS
Keep this file private. Anyone with the dashboard link
and password can see your tracking data.

Dashboard        https://press-desk.byline.workers.dev/7qF2mXb9/
Password         9Kz4rTnW8vQmJ2hLpYc6
Outlook add-in   https://press-desk.byline.workers.dev/7qF2mXb9/manifest.xml

Tracker address  https://press-desk.byline.workers.dev
Cloudflare name  press-desk (Worker and database)

If your company blocks custom add-ins, forward IT the approval brief that setup writes into the folder. It covers where the data goes, what the add-in can read and how to remove it, which is usually enough to get a yes.

What it cannot tell you

Open tracking has always been approximate, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Keep these in mind when you read the numbers:

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads images before the recipient sees the message, so some Apple opens never happened
• Outlook and Gmail block images until the reader allows them, so some real opens are missed entirely
• Corporate security scanners open everything seconds after delivery. The tracker flags those, which is the amber row in the demo above
• One record covers the whole email, so a pitch sent to five people tells you that somebody opened it, rather than which of the five

Clicks are firmer ground than opens. Replies are firmer still. We use the open data for timing follow-ups and testing subject lines, and we would not put it in a client report as a measure of success.

Where you stand legally

If you are emailing people in the UK or the EU, open and click tracking falls under UK GDPR and PECR, so your privacy notice needs to say that you do it. The kit stores a salted hash of each reader’s IP address rather than the address itself, and you can delete any pitch’s data from the dashboard whenever you want. Journalists’ contact details are personal data as well, so keep your list to work addresses and delete people who ask.

Please do not point this at a bought list. It is built for considered outreach to people whose work you have read.

If you would rather not run it yourself

Finding the story and pitching it to the right desks is what we do all week as part of our iGaming SEO services. The tracker is only the part that tells us whether the pitch landed. If you want the coverage without building anything yourself, drop us a line.