Email Performance Metrics: switching away from the content builder

Question

We recently started using AMPscript for our emails instead of manually adding images one by one. Before, we used to alter the pixels of the images to the desired size (400x400 pix) and then would upload them to the content builder. Then in the email we would select the images from the content builder.

With the new code, we can select the image url right from our website, skipping all these steps. However, the image in the website is 1000x1000. Before implementing this code, we wanted to know if there was a metric or a way to see how this would affect the send performance and the download speed for the subscribers receiving the email. If there are, where can we find them? Is there any downside to skipping the content builder altogether and using an external link in terms of performance in the marketing cloud?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can do the following: open the email in a browser using the View As a Web Page link and use Chrome developer tools to measure the load time.

1. Open the email in Chrome, then right-click and select inspect or hit F12 to open the console
2. In the console, click on the Network tab
3. In the top right corner, you will see 'No throttling' - click on it and select an option (I usually choose Fast 3G or Slow 3G)
4. Refresh the page and watch the email load - do this for all the versions and compare results

Here is a screenshot: