Reading campaign statistics

A sent campaign has a report: how many left, how many arrived, how many were opened and clicked, and who did what. The numbers are honest about what they measure — which is less than the words suggest.

The counters

CounterWhat it counts
SentEmails handed to the provider
DeliveredAccepted by the receiving server
BouncesPermanently rejected — the address goes to the suppression list
OpensRecipients who loaded the tracking pixel at least once
Click rateRecipients who followed at least one tracked link
UnsubscribesRecipients who left through this campaign
Rates are computed on unique recipients, not on events: one person who opens six times is one open. The report also breaks the audience down — opened and clicked, opened only, never opened, bounced, unsubscribed — lists clicks per link, and shows the mail clients your readers use.

What an open does not prove

An open is a loaded image. That makes it a floor and a ceiling at once:
  • clients that block images by default record no open from a reader who read everything;
  • privacy proxies that pre-load images record an open from someone who never looked.
Which is why an open rate is worth comparing to your own past campaigns, and worth very little compared to anyone else's. A click is far more solid: someone acted.
The unsubscribe link is never tracked. It does not appear in the clicks-per-link table and never counts as a click. Neither does the topic opt-out link — a person leaving is not engagement.

What counts, and what does not

Test sends count in nothing. No open, no click, no progress, no line in the report — they are real emails that leave no statistical trace, which is what makes them safe to repeat. A recipient marked skipped was in the audience but received nothing: unsubscribed, suppressed, or having declined the campaign's topic between scheduling and departure. That is the gap between the audience you saw and the emails that went out.

What it implies elsewhere

Bounces and complaints are not just numbers here — they feed your sender reputation and land addresses on the suppression list permanently. A campaign with a visible bounce rate is telling you something about where its contacts came from. The same figures are readable over HTTP, per campaign, for reporting outside the app: see Content & Send.