Google's change and how it affects tracking email open rates

[Anonymous]

Google today announced a change to how images are rendered and tracked in Gmail.  The change affects our ability to track email open rates through Gmail for the desktop, and will affect email opened through Gmail apps for Android and iOS in the near future.


The Marketo Engineering team is working on a solution to this problem.  Please stay tuned for additional information. 

[Anonymous]

For first opens of a message, the new behavior causes Marketo open tracking to actually be more accurate than before. Previously, Gmail users had the option to load images within messages. When users declined, we would not consider this message as “opened.” Now, Gmail will automatically load images without asking permission (and Gmail is not currently caching these images upon delivery, only upon first open), causing us to always know when a message is opened for the first time.

[Anonymous]

Interesting, our eng team saw that the images were being cached upon the emails being opened, not received, which is why I thought we were in the clear. Well, guess we're in the same boat--we'll wait for the official response from Marketo!

[Anonymous]

Hi Amelia, Thanks for the quick response. 
My concern is simply the guessing going on at this point. Like you said in your second paragraph, we 'think' its going to work this way.

I just want to make sure tracking overall is going to be ok. From the sounds of it for all of us, as well as others out there on other forums, we are all kinda waiting and hoping we think its going to work the way we want. 

I've done multiple tests at this point and can't seem to cause an issue so that I'm happy to report. Until anyone can find a hole in gmail's new approach I'm not going to go too crazy 😉 . But to your engineers, it would appear the image is being cached/stored immediately upon the message being received. You can tell when you look at how they are pulling in the images in the source. 

Thanks for being so active on this topic Marketo!

Mike

[Anonymous]

@Michael: Not sure I understand your concerns--the Mailchimp blog post agrees with Marketo's statement in that unique open tracking won't be affected, and in fact would be improved by this change. Repeat opens might be affected, so that if someone opened the email 3 times it only appears as 1 time, but Cheryl pointed out that Marketo doesn't actually include multiple opens anyway in its email analytics, so we're not losing anything there (unlike MailChimp users).

The key distinction I believe is *when* the email image is being cached, before or after email open. If it's being cached *before* the email open, then your concern is valid and open numbers would look very off. But our team thinks it seems like it's being cached *after* the email open, which means that unique opens are still trackable, and ESPs like Marketo and MailChimp can take advantage of that, which is how unique open tracking would be unaffected.

[Anonymous]

This isnt sounding good.. Thanks for the post Steven it really does explain the issue. Its pointing out the glaring issue I mentioned that will cause problems.
And believe me people, there IS STILL an issue. There is the potential for huge gaps in our reporting. Almost to the point we will have to seperate the gmail users out from the rest to attempt to evaluate if the tracking is even working. 
All articles are pointing to this causing big problems. 😞

[Anonymous]

Mailchimp has a good summary here:

http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-open-tracking/

[Anonymous]

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[Anonymous]

Since opens require a pingback from the 1x1 pixel image in the emails, and gmail will now be storing these images on their own secure server, how is it that Marketo will be able to tell that a pingback is happening if the ping is going to google??

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html
"But thanks to new improvements in how Gmail handles images, you’ll soon see all images displayed in your messages automatically across desktop, iOS and Android. Instead of serving images directly from their original external host servers, Gmail will now serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers. "

Perhaps in your good news this was explained to you. Cheryl can you elaborate on how this is going to work?

[Anonymous]

Hi Everyone,

I have great news.  Further investigation revealed that the change Google made has no impact to our open rates.  In fact, our open rates will likely be more accurate because they will automatically load images.  Since we don't track multiple opens of emails or do anything with the IP information, you should not be impacted in any way by this change!

Thanks,
Cheryl

[Anonymous]

Wouldn't it count EVERYONE as having opened it, not 0 people? I assumed when I saw that news last night that I could essentially no longer trust the results of any gmail address as they'd all show as positive. Perhaps it's the other way, and 0 people will show. Anyone got any more info on that?

[Anonymous]

FYI, there is a "Subscribe to this Discussion" at the top of every discussion.  Clicking this link subscribes you to that discussion.  No longer need to comment just to subscribe.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Dan! 

[Anonymous]

@Matt:

Here's the original post from Google:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

Here's a post from TC:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/12/gmail-open-rates/

There's a rather inflammatory post on Ars Technica, and several followups from email service providers online, just google "gmail image caching" to find a bunch of stuff. 🙂

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have a link to the announcement from Google?

[Anonymous]

subscribing

[Anonymous]

Mary - 

If the preview pane loads the images, that does count as an open, as far as I know. Opens are strictly based on loading the included pixel tag (or beacon? not sure what the 1px image is technically called). 


Another thing to note - although reported open rates may go down, real open rates should not be affected. In fact, I think this may actually result in a slight bump to CTR because Gmail users now see the images-- which are usually more appealing than boxes with alt text...

Best, 
Dan

[Anonymous]

Also subscribing to this but I have a question. 

For Outlook - does the preview pane count as an open? Im thinking No but they did see the content of your email...

Thanks!

[Alex_Stanton1]

subscribing

[Michelle_Tizian]

Glad I visited the community today to see this.  Thanks for posting!

[Anonymous]

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