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Boom can tell you which of your emails were opened. It does this through your email provider’s tracking, which only works once your sending domain has a tracking subdomain with its own DNS record. Until then, the open count on a journey reads as not measured rather than as zero.
Tracking is set up once per organization, in Settings → Email, on the Open and click tracking card. It applies to every email Boom sends from your domain after it becomes active.

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What each one measures

The two are independent: you can turn on opens, clicks, or both.
Open rates appear in a journey’s analytics. Click counts are not shown in Boom yet, so turning clicks on today rewrites your links without adding a number to your dashboard.

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Set it up

1

Choose a tracking subdomain

On the Open and click tracking card, pick a short name such as links. Boom combines it with your sending domain, so links on example.com becomes links.example.com. Use letters, numbers and hyphens only.
2

Turn on opens, clicks, or both

Flip the switches you want and press Save. Boom registers the subdomain with the email provider and shows the DNS record to add.
3

Add the CNAME record

At your DNS provider (Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Squarespace and so on), add the CNAME record exactly as shown on the card: the same name and the same value.
4

Check the record

DNS changes can take from a few minutes to a few hours. Press Check again on the card until the badge reads Active.
The badge on the card tells you where you are:
Once you set a tracking subdomain, you can change it later but not remove it. Changing it needs a new CNAME record, and tracking stays pending until that one is verified.

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Reading the numbers

Open rates are a useful signal, not an exact count:
  • Some mail apps open everything. Apple Mail’s privacy protection loads the tracking image for every email it receives, whether or not the person reads it, which pushes open rates up for Apple Mail users.
  • Some readers block images. A person who never loads images is never counted as opening, even if they read the email or reply to it.
On a journey’s analytics, the Email view tells you when its open count can’t be trusted, and shows — instead of a percentage in that case:

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Good to know

  • Only new emails are tracked. Emails sent before tracking became active can never report opens or clicks, even after you turn it on.
  • Tracking never affects sending. A pending or failed tracking record does not stop your domain from sending email.
  • Your links still work. With clicks on, the link a person sees in the email points at your tracking subdomain first, then forwards to the original address, unsubscribe links included.