Google stirred up the pot when they introduced the tabbed Gmail interface. Of course, marketers have noticed a shift in stats and trends because of the change. Realistically, the change means many were factoring out email power users who already used filters for their inbox.
Regardless of how you feel about the tabbed layout, Google just made another change under the hood and they were very secretive about it this time around. Gmail has actually started caching images, which is resulting in a general outcry that the company has killed email marketing. Whether such claims are true or not remains to be seen. However, the cached images will definitely affect stat tracking tools for email marketing.
Image Caching
If you didn’t already know this, email service providers (EMPs) use images to track various stats and data associated with marketing efforts. It’s because standard emails are static all by themselves until you factor in the images which must be downloaded by readers when they open a message. As the image is downloaded, information can be relayed to the host which is collected and used for tracking.
Like empire trucks, the downloaded images dump a bunch of info onto the email host. Let’s break that info down and talk briefly about what kind of insights it can provide.
- Location data: this allows companies to see the location of the reader through their IP address. It helps tremendously when delivering location based adverts or images.
- Referrer: this allows companies to see the platform used to download the content. Through this information companies can detect if users are browsing via the native web interface or one of the mobile apps.
- Browser version: this allows companies to see what browser a reader is using. This info can be used to deliver custom images for various browser versions.
- Cookies: there are actually a lot of different uses for cookies when it comes to advertising and stat tracking. The most important is that advertisers can synch data between various platforms including their CRM database.
- Time data: this includes anything to do with time sensitive data or adverts. For example, through this info companies can deliver limited time offers or coupons to customers, with images that are affected by time.
- View counts: this relates directly to message views. Not only can it track total views, but also recurring views if an email is opened more than once.
Since Gmail’s images are now cached, it will ruin data collection for all of these elements, and view counts will likely suffer the most. Total views are going to drop and it’s going to largely affect stat tracking for multiple views or email opens. However, total views can still be collected when a user downloads images.
Gmail will load an image the first time any reader opens a message, thus resulting in an increase in the unique view count. If a user returns and opens that same email while the image is cached the total view count and recurring count won’t be affected. The latter scenario is what will cause the biggest issue in terms of stat tracking.
How Will This Affect Your Marketing Efforts
Going forward, it will be more difficult to determine how effective your email marketing strategy really is. The insights listed above are important to building a successful marketing campaign. This issue, coupled with the recently implemented tabbed layout, may very well cause some serious issues for email marketers.
How you fare is going to depend largely on your EMP and whether or not they can find alternate ways to track said data. Currently, MailChimp is reporting that the iPhone client still tracks multiple opens yet the status of the mobile Gmail app (iPhone, Android) is uncertain. It’s possible the changes may roll out to all platforms sometime soon, or not at all.
Why Would Google Do Such a Thing?
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact motives behind a change like this, especially since Google has been so quiet about the whole thing. One can assume that it has everything to do with privacy and performance in regards to Gmail. Of course, there may be other agendas plugged in there somewhere.
Google image caching now effectively hides the IP address of readers and other personal information like location data, browser version and more. This comes as no surprise since Google has always done well to hide the host IP address of emails.
As for performance, caching images makes the experience speedy for nearly everyone involved. Depending on the sender, image delivery can take a long time and so can downloading an image on the reader’s side of the transaction. The new cached images can be loaded and unloaded much faster, resulting in a speedier experience for all parties.