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

[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]

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[Anonymous]

Does anyone have a link to the announcement from Google?

[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]

Thank you Dan! 

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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