How Google’s email policy affects open tracking

This article explains why tracking email opens is no longer relevant for monitoring engagement and what you can do to adapt to this change.

Google started blocking images in emails sent to Gmail users and notifying them about potentially suspicious emails. This appears to be part of Google’s ongoing efforts to protect users from spam and protect their privacy.

Blocking images means that “tracking pixels” in emails will also be blocked – this prevents open tracking from functioning properly (detecting email opens and logging them into statistics).

A tracking pixel is commonly used for open tracking in cold email software. It’s a pixel-sized invisible image that is inserted to emails to track when recipients open the email. Since open tracking relies on these pixels, it will affect the accuracy of your campaign’s open rate metrics.

If you’re using open tracking or adding images to your email content, your recipients may see a notification that says: “Images in this message are hidden. This message might be suspicious or spam.”

Even if the email is plain text with no images, the alert may appear if it contains a tracking pixel.

Why the “Message might be suspicious” warning appears

It’s clear that Google isn’t directly targeting images or open tracking, but blocks them in emails that are seen as unwanted (unsolicited) by other factors.

This may happen with some recipients, especially when sending cold emails or contacting a prospect for the first time. Here are some factors that can increase the likelihood of that:

• Your sender reputation: If Gmail’s reputation data shows that the sender can be trusted, your email is less likely to be flagged.
• Your previous interactions with the recipient: If you’ve contacted the lead before and had positive interactions via email, your emails won’t be flagged.
• Your lead targeting: If the recipient is carefully targeted, they may ignore the warning if they find the email valuable. For follow-ups to the same recipient, the alert will likely disappear because Gmail will see that you’re sending desired emails.

What are the next steps

The takeaway from this update is that Gmail is pushing email outreach toward a safer standard and encouraging senders to improve and adapt. Here are some actionable tips to help ensure your emails to Gmail users don’t get flagged.

Step 1: Turn off open tracking and use link tracking instead

Open rates no longer accurately reflect how engaged your prospects are, especially if a large portion of your recipients are Gmail users.

Link tracking is an alternative way to monitor who interacts with your emails. You can also add Clicked on link conditions to your sequence.

Remember to configure a custom tracking domain—this will make link tracking safe to use.

How to set up custom domain for tracking →

Step 2: Add images properly

The simplest solution is to avoid adding images, but if they help convey value in your emails, you’ll want to keep using them. Reconsider how you use images in your emails—remove anything unnecessary and keep only what’s needed.

To add images safely:

• Use the “Upload image” option in the email campaign editor to add images directly from your computer. This way, Snov.io will store them on secure servers, which makes it safer. Adding images via HTML (using embed code or links from external servers) is more likely to trigger the spam filter.
• If you’re contacting a lead for the first time, don’t add images in the first email at all. You can include them in follow-ups if the recipient shows engagement.

Step 3: Measure engagement using Reply rate or Booked meetings

Don’t count on the open rate as a valid metric for measuring engagement. The reply rate is a much better indicator of your campaign’s success. Snov.io tracks replies for emails and messages sent through LinkedIn Automation.

You can monitor the reply rate on the statistics dashboard for specific campaigns or the general Reports dashboard.

For those who don’t use reply rates as one of the main KPIs, you can use the integration with Calendly to track booked meetings.

Step 4: Send multichannel campaigns

Email is not the only available channel—use LinkedIn outreach as well.

Combine email and LinkedIn in multichannel campaigns to have an additional way to contact prospects.

If you want to learn more about using automated LinkedIn actions, see our LinkedIn Automation course on Udemy →

Step 5: Improve your sender reputation

Having a good sender reputation is crucial now—your emails are less likely to be flagged if your reputation is strong. Email warm-up can help you gain a good sender score or restore a damaged reputation.

Start Email warm-up →

Step 6: Troubleshoot your email content before sending

Remember to check that your emails follow best practices by running Deliverability tests →