F
Flame Bandicoot
First I want to mention Axios HQ’s analytics have been a gamechanger for our internal comms team! We rely on them every week to see what’s resonating.
Lately, though, we’re seeing a new wrinkle: Gmail’s Enhanced Safe Browsing (likely similar to other providers) pre-scans messages, firing the tracking pixel before employees actually see the email/newsletter in their inbox. That significantly inflates “opens” and muddies the story we share with stakeholders.
We realize Gmail doesn’t pass unique identifiers, so there’s no perfect filter. We’re no experts, but here are a few enhancement ideas:
  1. Time‑based discard toggle: give us the option to see & ignore opens that fire within the first X seconds/minutes of delivery, where bot activity is most common.
  2. Confidence tiers: label each remaining open as Likely or Confirmed based on extra signals (time opened, clicks, etc. — ideally it could work for anonymized analytics too).
  3. Gmail add‑in: a centrally deployed plug‑in that fires a “message viewed” event via Gmail API only when an employee actually opens the newsletter, giving us a bot‑proof open signal that complements pixel and time‑based filters.
  4. Quick‑reaction metrics (e.g., card likes): elevate these high‑confidence signals alongside opens to give us a clearer read on what actually resonated.
  5. Auto‑preload flag: surface an alert when there's a high volume of suspected bot opens, so teams can look into the issue and caveat their reports.