How to track your Gmail deliverability!

If you aren’t monitoring how your deliverability to Gmail is performing and how your Gmail subscribers are engaging with your email campaigns, you could find yourself in a pile of 💩, which could take forever to clean up.

You need to understand how to monitor your deliverability as well as how to segment your subscribers to handle any issues that may arise.

I put together this quick 10-minute video explaining how it’s done.

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Monitoring Complaint Rates

Since Gmail does not provide a FBL (Feedback Loop), you have to monitor your Gmail complaints inside of Google Postmaster Tools.

There are two places to monitor your complaints within Gmail’s Postmaster Tools.

First, you can view the Spam Rate report on the standard domain dashboard. This will give you the daily breakdown in percentage of your complaints.

Secondly, they have an updated compliance status dashboard which you can access by clicking the link towards the top of the Google Postmaster Tools dashboard.

When you get to the compliance status dashboard make sure to select your domain in the Domain drop-down at the top of the page.

If you see Compliant next to User-reported spam rate you're good to go.

If you see Needs Work, you have some work to do to verify that your outgoing messages meet the spam complaint requirements.

Remember… you need to be under 0.3% complaint rate, but shoot for under 0.1%.

Analyzing Engagement by Domain

Unfortunately, most ESPs do not provide email campaign stats broken down by domain.

An ESP like BigMailer below, has an Engagement By Domain report which is perfect so you can easily monitor if a specific domain is having an issue.

You can easily use the report above to see if open rates or click-through rates for any specific domain are well below your average metrics, so you can easily make adjustments as needed.

Just because your ESP doesn’t provide this breakdown, you’re still responsible for understanding how your emails are delivering across the different Internet Service Providers.

Gmail especially!!!!!

Luckily you can create segments to monitor your delivery to different ISPs as broken down below.

Monitoring Your Deliverability Via Segmentation

To monitor deliverability using segments you need to create 3 reporting segments.

• Sent in the Last 24 Hours

• Opened in the Last 24 Hours

• Clicked in the Last 24 Hours

If you create these segments for each domain group, you can isolate the deliverability metrics of each.

Beehiiv Gmail Reporting Segments

For those who are using Beehiiv, you can create the segments below to monitor your Gmail deliverability.

Below are the exact settings for each of the segments listed above.

Gmail - Sent - Last 24 Hours

Gmail - Opens - Last 24 Hours

Gmail - Clicks - Last 24 Hours

Advanced Sending Segments to Manage Engagement by Domain Group

Now that you know how to monitor your delivery by domain, especially as it relates to Gmail, you have to have the ability to manage exactly who you are sending to for a specific domain group.

DISCLAIMER: Do not use advanced segmentation if you are not familiar with segments and or monitoring your stats by domain.

To manage your delivery by domain there are 4 segments you should utilize per domain group to manage who receives your emails. These are listed below.

Base Sending Segment by Domain

You would have to setup these 4 segments for each of the domain groups (Gmail, Yahoo/AOL, Comcast, Microsoft, and Other).

Or you could just set them up for Gmail and Non-Gmail to make it more simplified at first.

Depending on your deliverability you may need to TIGHTEN these segments to improve your engagement.

Tightening is basically the practice of lowering the timeframes of your engagement windows.

For example:

• Instead of 30 day clickers you might tighten to 15 day clickers.

• Instead of 90 day clickers and 15 day openers you might tighten to 60 day clickers and 15 day openers.

• Instead of 15 day openers who were added in the last 90 days, you might switch to 15 day openers added in the last 60 days.

The bigger your deliverability issue, the tighter you may have to make your segments.

There are no magic segmentation numbers to follow, you’ll just have to learn how the ISPs are reacting to your emails based on the segmentation numbers you are sending.

Just remember to monitor your complaints and engagement metrics (I mainly focus on click-through rate) to ensure your deliverability.

Especially for Gmail!!!!!

If you have Gmail or Overall Delivery Issues with your email campaigns please feel free to reach out.

Track that Gmail,
Chris Miquel

Follow me on Twitter: @miqchris

And on Linkedin at: chrismiquel