Opens and Clicks not being tracked through plugin

[MillerMedia]

See support request here: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/have-you-seen-cases-where-mandrill-records-0-opens/

Way to recreate: • Install plugin • Go to settings and toggle on both 'Track Opens' and 'Track Clicks' and click 'Save Changes' • Use the test email form at the bottom of the settings • View email in your email browser • Log into your Mandrill account, go to 'Outbound' • The email sent should appear in the Outbound log but no opens are recorded

[RT-PDX]

I did some research on this one. This is what seems to happen:

1) Mandrill takes a long time to up date their data. Even if the click comes (and shows as) a few minutes after opening it actually can take hours (3+ not unusual) to actually update the mandrill->Outbound->Activity record. There are some reports on the out there on this aspect being lower priority to Mandrill processing ... and it shows! I figure they sum them first (per mail) and then update once in batch.

2) Further, as to the plugin. I made it work with the test form but had to do the following:

• Select both tracking checkbox settings
• Save the settings
• Create a text message and depending on how the mandrill_>settings_default sending settings are setup had to put some html around the link i put into the message piece. So <a href="http://google.com>Click me would be translated into a mandrill track link but without the html tags (so plain "http://google.com") it would not work as my mandrill->settings->sending_defaults are for to not translate plain text to html.

Sounds like we need to add some text to the help pages and/or make it dummy proof and always force html in the test message option.

[MillerMedia]

@RT-PDX great catch. I went back into our Mandrill account today to see if the Opens from yesterday were reflected, and they were. So it does seem like it works fine, there's just a potential big delay in the statistics being added in the Mandrill dashboard. This answer from a product research employee at MailChimp on Stack Overflow confirms that:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/25165858/975592

Adding some text to the plugin for context would be great. I don't think it necessarily needs to be prominent, maybe we could just add a tab to the help tab with info on Opens & Clicks and a note that there could be delays in seeing stats in the dashboard. Either that and/or in the Dashboard showing stats. I'm open to whatever makes the most sense.