What is the Affect of Google Prefetching?

As the trend of anonymized email open data ramped up in 2021 with Apple’s launch of Mail Privacy Protection and SendGrid’s launch of Apple Open Identifiers, there’s been more interest in the anonymization of open data, specifically around Google prefetching opens. This post explains what Google prefetching is, how to detect prefetching, and what Twilio SendGrid’s plans are to flag prefetching in the future.

What is Google prefetching?

Prefetching is a technique for speeding up operations by beginning a fetch function whose result is expected to be needed soon. This means an email is sent to this recipient during an active/open web session. The inbox provider loads all images immediately before the web UI displays the email.

Google has been prefetching images to allow for faster image loading for a while. We first reported this behavior in 2013, and you can read more about our initial findings here. Since then, we have not seen any significant increases in prefetching opens. Through our research of the past six months, we found that Gmail prefetching accounts for roughly 2% or less of total email opens month over month.

How is Google prefetching different from Apple Mail Privacy Protection?

In September 2021, Apple updated their mail app to allow users to have more control over their data privacy. You can read more about our findings and how to identify this behavior in your sending here. Ultimately, Apple’s mail app similarly causes prefetch opens when the security feature is enabled for Apple mail users.

Both Apple and Gmail are using prefetching in both of these cases, but they are doing so to serve their mailbox users differently. Therefore, we advise senders to look at the impact of prefetching from Gmail and Apple differently.

• Gmail signals someone was active in the inbox, resulting in Gmail wanting to render the content quicker in order to provide a better user experience with shorter loading times.
• Apple signals that the recipient has requested anonymity in engagement; they are seeking data privacy.

Both Apple and Gmail may require you to better understand how people are engaging with your brand beyond email opens , so you’ll need to treat your next communications with them differently. Clicks, conversions, and app activity are good additional metrics to explore.

Each organization and recipient list is different, and the strategy you build to engage with your customers should reflect that. If you have questions around how to build and/or adapt your email strategy with items like Gmail prefetching in mind, reach out to our Expert Services team.

How do I identify these types of prefetched opens?

As of today, if you are looking to identify Gmail prefetch opens, you can find the user agent string below passed to you in our event webhook.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.246 Mozilla/5.0

We are reasonably confident that opens generated from this string are indicative of the Gmail prefetch activity as these happen within seconds of delivery. In testing we also are seeing these happen when someone has recently had an active web application. You may see continued genuine human open activity after seeing the Gmail perfect open activity. This would however come from a different user agent string.

Will Twilio SendGrid create a Gmail Open Indicator?

We are committed to ongoing research in order to find the most effective way to flag prefetch opens when they have a considerable impact on conventional open data. Currently, our Apple Open Indicator is unique to Apple MPP related open events because those opens have inflated and anonymized a considerable percentage of conventional open data. Since we are not seeing a considerable impact, or increase in impact from Google prefetching, we have not prioritized a flag for the webhook unique to these opens at this time.

As this prefetching trend continues, we anticipate there may be other providers beyond Gmail that senders will want to identify. However, today we are not seeing any large or increasing amounts of prefetch opens coming from other providers. We will continue to provide information on these trends as they evolve, and consider deliverability services for consultative advice unique to your email program goals.