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

[Anonymous]

Mailchimp has a good summary here:

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

[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]

@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]

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]

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]

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.