Google Postmaster Tools: Understanding Sender Reputation

Tracking your sender reputation can feel a lot like tracking Bigfoot. You do your best to key into the clues left out in front of you by the mysterious inbox service providers (ISPs) about your track record, but their true opinions on your sender reputation remain elusive. Unlike Bigfoot and other cryptids, which aren’t real (we think), ISPs are very real —  and not many of them offer the transparency needed in order to adapt your sending practices to avoid spam filters.

Thankfully, Gmail does offer this transparency with Google Postmaster Tools, a tool that gives you direct insight into your domain reputation, IP reputation, and more. This can be important, especially when you consider Gmail’s large influence in the world of email. In this post, we’ll walk you through some of Postmaster’s features and how you can use them to your advantage.

ACCORDING TO SEVERAL ONLINE STATISTICS, GMAIL HAD AROUND 1.5 BILLION ACTIVE USERS AS OF OCTOBER 2018, AND THE GMAIL RECIPIENTS CAN MAKE UP SOMETIMES AS HIGH AS 60% OF A COMPANY’S LIST.

What is Google Postmaster Tools?

If you are a high volume sender and send a large portion of your email to Gmail recipients, Google Postmaster Tools can help you monitor your performance and get ahead of deliverability issues before they happen. Even if Gmail is not your primary focus, understanding how your mail is perceived by Gmail can give you a better understanding of how you are perceived elsewhere.

How do I use Google Postmaster Tools?

Getting started with Google Postmaster Tools is pretty straight forward. First, add your authenticated sending domain. This can either be your root domain or your subdomains depending on how you want your information presented. If you choose to add your root domain, data will be aggregated across any related subdomains and IPs. If you segment your traffic into multiple subdomains, it’s a good idea to add each one to Postmaster Tools separately to keep your data points focused.

Once you get set up and running, Google will give insight into several data points organized into different postmaster tools dashboards. These data points include a couple of Google Postmaster metrics you might be familiar with and a few that speak more to your sending habits or processes, such as:

Spam rate dashboard

The spam rate dashboard tracks how many users are reporting your messages as spam. Tracking spam complaint rates is a serious business, and ensuring you are taking action on those complaints is even more important. By gaining insight into the volume of these complaints and using it as a data point to compare against your domain or IP reputation can give senders like you insight into reputation dips.

Domain reputation tracking

As mentioned earlier, in order to track your domain reputation you can either add a root domain which will show the statistics for that domain and any subdomains, or you can add individual subdomains and track reputation individually. If you are using subdomains at all, it is a good idea to add them individually to keep an eye on their macro level reputation and understand if that content is hitting an inbox or getting sent straight to spam. Reputation for both domains and IPs is tracked with simple color coding, ranging from a deep red (bad!) to green (good!). The nicer the color, the more likely your messages are going to that sweet, sweet inbox and not taking the sad train into the spam folder.

IP reputation tracking

Similarly to domain reputation, your IP reputation also plays a role in deliverability. Again, this reputation dashboard is color-coded the same way the domain reputation is coded, (red = bad and green = good), and it represents the likelihood that messages will be delivered to the inbox— except for your sending IP addresses. It is important to note that dedicated IPs will give you a much better measure of control over these statistics, whereas shared IPs will fluctuate often regardless of your actions. 

Feedback loop

For email senders that have signed up with Google’s Feedback Loop (FBL) to track campaign specific complaint rates, you may have access to the Feedback Loop Dashboard. The dashboard will provide two graphs to track the Average Feedback Loop Spam rate across any identifiers (specific campaigns, customers, or “other”) flagged by the FBL, as well as an Identifier Volume Graph showing the number of unique identifiers broken down daily.

Message authentication

This handy Postmaster dashboard tracks your messages that have passed DMARC, SPF, or DKIM authentication. There you will find a simple graph that displays the percentage of messages that have passed authentication. If you do have any authentication related issues, such as no published DMARC, you may see that percentage dip or sit at 0%—which means it’s time to diagnose and fix a problem.

Encryption

The Encryption dashboard for Google will break down the percentage of inbound or outbound mail that has passed TLS compared to all mail coming from or being sent to your domain. Essentially, it gives you a better idea of what your email volume overall looks like. It’s a simple, but important dashboard to know.

Delivery errors dashboard

To get an idea of your delivery rate, you should look at your Delivery Errors dashboard. Here you can see the volume of messages that were either rejected or temporarily failed to deliver — including a reason why the failure occurred. So, for example, if your messages were rejected due to a misconfigured DMARC policy, that information will be available on that dashboard.

Share Google Postmaster Tools with your team

When it comes to email insights, sharing is definitely caring. Should you need to provide shared Postmaster access to your team members (or your Technical Account Manager if you have  Mailgun’s Managed Deliverability Services) to these dashboards, all they need to have is a valid Google account. This share feature is similar to other Google apps, but, should you run into any problems, you can ask for additional help through the Google Postmaster platform – https://postmaster.google.com.

Wrapping up

It should be obvious by now that Postmaster Tools is incredibly essential for troubleshooting one’s sender reputation. With its specific dashboards, color-coded metrics, and support, it can help you revamp your Gmail-based email deliverability and give your email program the strength of Bigfoot. Use it wisely, address the issues you see in Google Postmaster Tools, and your email deliverability (and your Mailgun TAM) will thank you. Need to get started sending email? We can help you with that.