When Do People Open a Document You Send? Open and Re-Open Timing Data

Every figure below comes from links people shared through PDFTrackr. The documents are not labelled by type, so this is the whole mix senders share, and not a proposal statistic or a pitch-deck statistic. To time your own, share the document as a tracked link: start free and the first open shows up with the pages read.

How soon is a shared document first opened? Half within 2.7 hours

The median link got its first real open 2.7 hours after it was created. The spread is wide. A quarter of links were opened within about 24 minutes, and a quarter waited more than 25.9 hours. The first day carries most of it: 74.4% of opened links had their first real open inside 24 hours.

One thing pulls the early numbers down a little. Sessions in the first 10 minutes after a link is created are dropped, because that is often the sender previewing their own link, and we can't tell the two apart. A recipient who opened within those 10 minutes loses that open here, and the link's first counted open becomes a later one, or the link drops out. The fastest quarter was probably quicker than the figure of about 24 minutes shown.

The open you see seconds after sending is a different thing. A corporate mail gateway often fetches every link before the email reaches the inbox. Microsoft's documentation for its Safe Links filter says so directly:

“As long as Safe Links protection is turned on, URLs are scanned prior to message delivery, regardless of whether the URLs are rewritten or not.”

Those fetches are flagged and kept out of these figures. How large that share is, and how the classifier decides, is on how many document opens are bots or scanners.

Do people come back to a document on a later day? 14.0% of named viewers did

Of 1,254 pairs of a link and an email typed at that link's gate, 14.0% had real sessions on more than one calendar day (UTC). The email is whatever the viewer typed at the gate, and this figure treats every address alike, so a pair is a named viewer and not a confirmed person. Links without the email gate can't enter this figure at all, because an anonymous visitor can't be matched across days.

Sessions kept arriving after the first week. About 1 in 5 real sessions on these links (19.4%) started more than seven days after the link was created. The base for that share is every real session that started more than 10 minutes after its link was created, the same owner-preview rule as above, pooled across all links.

What does this mean for your follow-up? Among opened links, half waited more than 2.7 hours

Read the timing as a guide to how long a first open can take, with one limit: every share here is of links that were eventually opened. Links never opened aren't in this data, so it can't tell you how likely an unopened link is to be opened later. Of links that were eventually opened, half had their first real open more than 2.7 hours after the link was made, 74.4% had it within the first 24 hours, and 16.2% got it only after more than three days.

The return is the stronger signal. A named viewer who comes back on another day is looking at the document again, and in our data that happened on 14.0% of pairs. Write when they come back and ask about the pages they went back to. The decision itself, with the proposal-specific advice, is in when to follow up after sending a proposal.

How we measured the open timing

How do other published open-timing figures compare? Bigger samples, different clocks

Two larger datasets publish a time to first open, and both start their clock at send. We read each page on 29 Oct 2026. Papermark's Fundraising Report 2026 gives a median of 7.9 hours from sending to the first open, on investor pitch decks, over 24,541 decks and 358,672 views labelled 2024–2026. It also reports 26.5% of decks reopened on a later day, without saying whether that counts per link or per viewer. Proposify's State of Proposals 2026 gives 34 minutes as the average time from sending a proposal to the prospect opening it, across 742,137 proposals sent through Proposify in 2025.

Their samples are far larger than our 352 links, and we don't compete with that. Three differences matter when you put the numbers side by side. Our clock starts earlier, at link creation. Proposify publishes an average, and an average of a skewed wait sits in a different place from a median. And neither page we read (fetched 29 Oct 2026) states how it treats scanner opens, so you can't tell whether a gateway's pre-delivery fetch counts as their first open. Ours excludes it. Our 14.0% re-open share is per link and typed email on UTC days, which is a narrower unit than Papermark's.

What does Pro do with the open and the return? It tells you the day they happen

The timing data above comes from the same per-page tracking that runs on free PDF tracking, where opens reach you in a daily digest on days with activity. Pro moves that to the moment. You get an email when your link opens. At that point no reading has happened yet, so the email screens by user agent only, and a scanner posing as a browser can still trigger it. After the visit closes, the Reading Report follows, scored on the full session, with one line per reader: pages read, time spent, the page they stopped on.

Pro also groups repeat visits under the email a reader gave your link, and emails you when that reader comes back to the same link. Across days this works on links with the email gate on; an anonymous visitor can be matched as returning only within the same day. Upgrade when you are following up on several documents a week and want the return to reach you the day it happens rather than the next time you check. See what Pro includes, or open the live demo dashboard to see the per-page view on sample data.

Keep reading: page-by-page PDF analytics, how free PDF tracking works.