How to Set Up and Use Gmail Email Annotations?
Understand Gmail Email Annotations and how to enable them for your email campaigns. Discover supported formats, eligibility rules, and configuration steps.
About Email Annotations
→ Understanding Email Annotations
Gmail Email Annotations are a feature available in the Promotions tab of the Gmail mobile app. They allow senders to surface additional information directly in the inbox, such as product carousels or promotional details.
With Email Annotations, users can preview and interact with a promotion directly from their inbox, without opening the email.
By immediately highlighting the value of an offer, Email Annotations help promotions stand out in the inbox, improving visibility and potentially increasing engagement and open rates.
→ Available Annotation Formats
Batch supports two formats of email annotations:
Product Carousels
Display multiple product images associated with a promotion, along with descriptions and price tags.
Deal Annotations
Display a promotional badge and key offer details, such as a discount or special message. Annotations help your message stand out in the inbox by clearly surfacing the value of your email at a glance.
→ Annotations Visibility
Email annotations are rendered by Gmail only if all of the following conditions are satisfied:
Mass send requirement:
The message must qualify as a mass send according to Google’s internal criteria. In practice, this requires sending the same email to more than 100 recipients as part of a single campaign.
One-off emails or small-scale test sends do not qualify and will not trigger annotations.
The content of the message, including annotation image URLs, must be identical across all recipients.
Sender eligibility: The sender domain must be approved and allowlisted by Google for email annotations.
Client support: The email must be opened in the Gmail mobile application. Email annotations are not supported on Gmail desktop or mobile web.
Inbox placement: The email must be delivered to the Promotions tab. Annotations are not rendered in the Primary inbox or other tabs.
Google-defined density cap: Annotation visibility is subject to a Google-defined density cap. When multiple annotated emails are already present in the inbox, additional annotations may not be displayed. This behavior is controlled entirely by Google.
Setting Up Annotations for a Template
→ Prerequisite
Gmail email annotations are available only to brands approved and allowlisted by Google.
To be allowlisted, your brand must submit key information to Google for review, including:
Brand information (name, website URL, etc.)
The list of subdomains used to send emails with annotations
The link-tracking subdomain used in your emails (for example, click.domain.com)
Once all required information is collected, send it by email to p-Promo-Outreach@google.com.
The review process typically takes 5 to 10 business days or longer.
→ Adding Annotations to Your Email
From the Batch email composer, open the template’s global settings from the top-right corner, then enable the "Email Annotations for Gmail" feature.
You can then select the email annotation type, configure it, and preview the result directly from the email composer.
→ Product Carousel
Product carousels allow you to display up to 10 items, including your logo, a short description, and a price. Each item has its own destination URL.
General Configuration
From the email composer, you can choose to include:
A sender logo: The logo associated with your email. Must be at least 40×40 px and provided as a valid PNG, JPG, or GIF file.
Headline & Price: Adds a label below each item and optionally displays a price, with support for discounts.
Card Properties
Each item includes the following fields:
Promo Image: Image of the item. Must be a valid PNG or JPEG file. All images must share the same aspect ratio, using one of the supported formats: 4:5, 1:1, or 1.91:1.
Product Card URL: Destination URL when the user clicks the item. Add UTM parameters if you want to track annotation performance.
Headline: A 1–2 line description displayed below the image.
Currency / Price: Currency and price of the product.
Discount: The amount deducted from the original price, displayed alongside the adjusted price (for example, if an item costs €100 and has a €10 discount, enter 10. The displayed price will automatically update to €90).
→ Deal Annotation
Deal annotations display a promotional badge in the inbox to highlight key offer details next to the subject line.
You can display the following information:
Sender Logo: The logo associated with your email. Must be at least 40×40 px and a valid PNG, JPG, or GIF file.
Deal Description: A short summary of the offer (for example, “Free delivery”).
Discount Code: A code users can apply at checkout to redeem the offer.
Offer Timing: Start and end time of the promotion.
Click and Conversion Tracking Limitations
Gmail does not provide ESPs with a mechanism to track clicks on individual items within email carousels. As a result, interactions with carousel items are not included in the click metrics of the associated email campaign or automation.
To evaluate the marketing effectiveness of a carousel, the following approaches can be used:
UTM tagging: Append UTM parameters to the URLs associated with each carousel item in order to track traffic and downstream performance in analytics tools.
Batch conversion goals: Use Batch conversion goals to measure the impact of the campaign on business-level metrics (e.g. conversions, revenue).
Resources
Know more on email annotations by reading Google's documentation.
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