http://blog.mailjet.com/post/69885299950/gmail-images-displayed-by-default-whats-the-impact
Some are saying this doesn't stop tracking. However, if I understand what Google are doing it seems like it would. How are e-mail marketers going to work around this?
watch this space :D
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/12/gmail-spying-explained
This article seems to be saying the complete opposite. Who do we believe?
it's both good and bad news for a marketer, depending on what and how you are measuring.
Previously GMail disabled images to be opened by default. That meant only about 4% of marketing emails were able to be recorded as 'opened' via the tracking tag - IE ONly about 4% of people said "Show me the images"
but.... for those 4% you could tell each and every time they opened the emails - Multi opens.
Those numbers were very stable and allowed a marketer to use the 4% as a guide alongside further known metrics (click throughs, sales etc) and project accordingly.
Now though as all images will be shown by default, every unique image, will be called at least once upon open. That means that 100% of the open rate can be recorded. The downside is that the image will then be cached by Google so multi opens won't then be recorded.
On top of that that, you wont be able to see what images are called from where, using what browsers etc etc - IE Normal log file analysis etc will break as all images will be called from Google's proxy with their (incorrect) proxy User Agent, IP etc.
so... this update is a bag of good news and bad news, depending on what you measure and how you measure it.
Thanks Jason. That makes a bit more sense. The first article had me thinking that GG's caching of the images would wipe out that sort of tracking. If you're still getting first-open data then it's much less of an issue.
Thankfully Gmail alerts me to this change and lets me keep the old no-images-downloaded setting if I want.
It all makes sense and looks pretty clear until this point:
Quote from: JasonD on December 16, 2013, 01:30:05 PM
Now though as all images will be shown by default, every unique image, will be called at least once upon open. That means that 100% of the open rate can be recorded. The downside is that the image will then be cached by Google so multi opens won't then be recorded.
Aren't they just copying any and all images found in the emails to their own servers, regardless of whether it has been opened or not, and only then serving them up from their servers showing them by default, so you don't get to see anything in terms of open rates? That was my impression at least...
I'd wondered whether the caching was based on the URL or the actual image itself, it appears to be URL.
So tracking images with unique URLs will continue to be seen on the first open.
Apparently sending a content-length: 0 prevents caching which would be ideal for tracking, but who knows that might eventually be 'patched' by Google.
They are not 'pre-fetching', not at the moment anyway. So every new remote image is only fetched by Google when the client opens the email.
Apparently they also refetch, so there's a finite time to what is cached.
what BoL said
Ah ok, so in this case the screaming over completely losing ability to track opening rates is indeed a bit exaggerated