Monitoring Gmail Deliverability with Google Postmaster Tools

Gmail as a service has over 1.5 billion users. These users can represent a large portion of a B2C sender's audience. To monitor your performance with this audience, Iterable's deliverability experts highly recommend using Google's Postmaster Tools. This free resource provides dashboards covering important data points and trends to help you maximize your inbox performance.

Continue reading to learn how to set up and use Google Postmaster Tools.

# In this article

# Set up Google Postmaster Tools

To set up Google Postmaster Tools, you need:

• A Google account.
• Access to edit DNS records for your sending domain(s).

To set up Google Postmaster Tools:

1. Add your domain to Google Postmaster Tools.
2. Add a TXT record to your domain's DNS (as provided by Google).
3. Verify your domain with Google Postmaster Tools.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 to add more sending domains as needed.

   TIP

   If you create the TXT record at your root domain (such as example.com) and verify that domain in DNS you can add any subdomain of your root domain (such as subdomain.example.com) in Postmaster Tools without any additional DNS records needed.

5. Provide read-only access to your team. Make sure to tell them you've given them access—Google doesn't send a notification to new viewers.

For comprehensive instructions, read Set Up Postmaster Tools (Google).

# Dashboards

When you access Postmaster tools, you can expect to see these data reports.

# Compliance status

The Google's compliance status dashboard informs you how compliant the selected domain is with the Gmail’s requirements at a given time.

These requirements include:

• SPF and DKIM authentication
• From:header alignment
• DMARC authentication
• Encryption
• User-reported spam rate: The current threshold is 0.3%, but senders should aim to remain under 0.1%.
• DNS records

Upcoming requirements have a coming soon placeholder and will soon show compliance with:

• One-click unsubscribe: Whether the domain is compliant with the (RFC8058) standard for one-click unsubscribe (also called easy unsubscribe). Applies to marketing messages only.
• Honor unsubscribe: Whether recipients continue to receive emails more than 48 hours after using one-click unsubscribe.

To learn about Gmail's compliance requirements, read Email Sender Guidelines (Google).

For more information about this dashboard and some troubleshooting tips, read Compliance status (Google).

# Compliance status for subdomains

Gmail aggregates the compliance status at the top-level domain level for now. This means that your root domain (such as example.com) and any of its subdomains (such as info.example.com, sales.example.com, news.example.com) all show the same compliance status in this dashboard.

# Spam rate

This dashboard shows the percentage of user-reported spam compared to all emails sent to the inboxes for active users.

Things to know:

• This metric only counts emails authenticated by DKIM.
• Emails delivered directly to the spam folder by a filter aren't included in the spam rate calculation. Only user-reported spam is included here.

# IP and domain reputations

Domain and IP reputations give a sense of whether Google's spam filter might classify emails from that domain or IP address as spam or not. Reputation isn't the only factor that a filter considers when determining inbox placement, but reputation is a helpful indicator of overall performance.

To see an up-to-date list of Google's reputation classifications, read Set Up Postmaster Tools (Google).

# Feedback loop

When there is a high enough spam rate to trigger a data point, this dashboard reflects some granular identifiers like campaign ID, project ID, or IP address.

# Authentication

This dashboards shows the percentage of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication that's passing inbound to Gmail.

This report only reflects aggregate percentages. DMARC-specific reporting would need to be set up outside of Google Postmaster Tools to get more details.

# Encryption

This dashboard shows what percentage of inbound and outbound traffic is TLS encrypted. Postmaster Tools only provides an aggregate percentage in this report. It should be at 100% when you're sending from Iterable.

# Delivery errors

If Google rejects any traffic on a given day, this dashboard shows the percentage of rejected messages and a high level reason for the rejections.

For a list of delivery errors, read Delivery Errors (Google).

# Locating your Gmail audience

B2C Gmail users have an address with gmail.com and googlemail.com domains. This is helpful to identify the cohort of Gmail users in your list.

To view the engagement metrics for this group, use the Audience tab in Messaging Insights to find users by their domain.

To earn more about this report, read Messaging Insights.

To create a segment of these users, go to Audience > Segmentation.

Find users that meet any of the following criteria:

• Must have Contact Property where Email Domain equals gmail.com
• Or Contact Property where Email Domain equals googlemail.com

To create a segment and save a dynamic list of these users, use Iterable's segmentation tool.

# Frequently Asked Questions

# Is there any PII in Postmaster Tools?

No. Google is very careful with data about their users that could be viewed as a privacy concern. Postmaster Tools only provides aggregate statistics which you can view after you've verified ownership with a DNS record.

# How much volume is necessary to start seeing Google Postmaster Tools reporting on?

Your domain must send at least 250 messages to Gmail users to generate metrics for each day.

# How far back does the data go?

Postmaster Tools limits data to the past 120 days.

# Are Gmail users who make spam complaints automatically unsubscribed?

No. Gmail has a nontraditional feedback loop and provides only anonymous spam complaint information to senders. Because Iterable doesn't receive enough information from Gmail to identify the users who've reported spam, these users:

• Do not have spam complaint events in their event history.
• Are not auto-unsubscribed via Iterable when they report a message as spam.

This is a general practice for Google, to protect user privacy. This isn't a limitation specific to using Iterable.

To avoid spam complaints from Gmail users, it's important to follow best practices. To learn more about Iterable's recommendations, read Maximizing Email Deliverability.

# What should I do if Google's report says my domain is not compliant with their requirements?

Review Gmail's sending requirements and take appropriate action to correct the issue.

Gmail aggregates compliance for subdomains at the top-level (root) domain. This means that a subdomain might show as non-compliant when in fact it is mail sent from the root domain that is not compliant. Make sure that you monitor all your email streams for issues.

# More questions

For answers to more questions not covered here, read Sender Requirements & Postmaster Tools FAQ (Google).