How Gmail's Image Changes Affect Accelo Campaign & Event Tracking

This week Gmail made changes to how they display images in emails, loading images by default but also making sure the images are served from Google servers to boost security & performance. These changes will have a slight affect on Accelo stats - read on below to see what it means.

Background

As we all know, email these days contains more than just black text on a white background. The ability to have bold text, bullets, links and images is all thanks to the use of the same language and format the web pages (like this one) use to display content being used as the format for emails - in essence, almost every email you get today is actually a web page.

However, unlike surfing the web, reading email is a more private experience - when you view a web page you're anonymous, but when you open an email someone has sent you, any images you load in or links you click on could be created just for you - in essence, telling the sender that you've opened the email or clicked on a link.

While this process is transparent to us as users and (mostly) harmless if the email is from someone we know and trust, the technique has been used in the past by spammers and other undesirable folks; for example, if you open an email from a spammer and load in the images from them you could in effect be telling the spammer that they've found a live target, thus encouraging them to send yet more spam. There have also been issues in the past with certain files bringing other nasty payloads like viruses. For these reasons, email clients for a number of years now have been hiding images by default when you open an email, including Gmail.

New Changes

This week Gmail rolled out a change to the way they loaded images into messages viewed in Gmail through your web browser and in the near future on your mobile device. In short, they're acting as a trusted middle-man, downloading images from the source server and checking them before then passing them onto you as a user. This will have three positive impacts on any of your email recipients who are using Gmail as their mail client:

• Your emails will now be delivered with images enabled and showing by default. This is a really good, significant improvement, because until now people had to choose to show images in an email, and as we know, requiring users to take another step to do anything means they probably won't. So, your emails, complete with signatures, will look better than they did before for most people using Gmail!
• Your open rates for Activity Events and Direct Email Campaigns will increase. The way Accelo tracks Open events for Activities and Direct Email Campaigns is by placing a very small, invisible image in the bottom of the email message. When the recipient opens the email, the loading of this image tells our statistics servers that a specific email to a specific person was opened. Before, if they hadn't chosen to "show images" we'd have no way of knowing the email was opened, but now Google is showing all images by default, you should see more accurate statistics around open rates (and they'll increase); our statistics have only ever included "unique opens" so you won't see a reduction in open rates across your campaigns. 
• The number of duplicate or repetative email Opens that you see on Activity Events will decrease. One of the downsides of our approach of tracking if an email has been opened is felt when a conversation goes back and forth a number of times in Gmail; when someone replies to your original email from Accelo (with the tracking image) Gmail will include that original message (and the image contained therein) at the bottom - if you (or someone else) opens this reply, they'll trigger another "open" event, which can bloat things. Going forward, this change means you won't be seeing these duplicates, making for a better user experience; of course, the down side is, you won't have a hint if your recipient opened the email 3 times or forwarded it onto other people who subsequently opened it - Gmail will only tell our statistics engine the first time it is opened, so it is a bit of a win and a loss here. 

If you've got any questions about these new changes, please ask them in the comments below or email [email protected].