Campaign Metrics And Message Status

Each individual message goes through a series of steps, from being generated in Customer.io, sent to a delivery provider, to arriving at its intended recipient! We keep a status for each message representing its place in that journey.

Here, we hope to give you some insight into what those statuses mean, and how we display them in different areas of Customer.io.

'Status' vs. 'Metric'

A message always has a status. We track its progress from when we first generate and try to send it, whether or not we're successful, and then how that end user interacts with it. Then, we roll those statuses and interactions into campaign metrics.

For example, here's an email with a Sent status. It has been Sent (its most recent interaction), but also opened, clicked, and driven a conversion:

All of these things are aggregated to form campaign metrics:

We do track everything, but our Delivery Log shows you the message's most recent status, like this:

Status during message preparation

A message can progress through several statuses before being sent to the delivery provider (which varies based on the message type). From that provider, it goes to your end user.

Queued

A message that is "in the queue" means that we're processing and getting ready to send it to the delivery provider. We've not attempted to send it yet, but we will soon.

Drafted

This means that a draft of that message has been generated, and is ready for you to either troubleshoot or send. We will not try to send it automatically. We have more information here on how drafts work.

Attempted

Attempted means that we've begun trying to pass your message on to the delivery provider (SendGrid in the case of emails, for example, or APNs/FCM for push notifications).

Sent

Sent means that your message has successfully made it from Customer.io to your delivery provider. It is now their responsibility to ensure the message is properly delivered, and we're waiting for further information to determine if the user interacted with it.

Failed

A failed message never made it to the delivery provider; we have a separate article to help you diagnose why your message never left Customer.io.

Delivered

Delivered means that we've received confirmation from the delivery provider that an email was sent to the recipient's email service provider (ESP).

Undeliverable

An undeliverable email was not sent to the delivery provider because the intended recipient has either been deleted or has unsubscribed.

Status after successful delivery

There are a few different types of statuses that can result after a person receives a message, and then interacts with it. They come from two places:

1. The delivery provider: for example, an email is considered delivered when the delivery provider confirms it was able to send the email to the recipient's email service provider (ESP). Similarly, a push notification is considered sent when we've successfully been able to send it to the delivery provider.
2. Your end-user: these statuses reflect interaction. Opened, Converted, Clicked are all examples of this.

Opened

The user opened your message. We count an email as being opened when the recipient's email client loads an invisible image (tracking pixel) or when the recipient clicks one of the links in the email. If a customer has images disabled in their email client and an open is tracked based on a click event, the "Opened Email" and the "Clicked Email" events will show as having occurred at the same time. Similarly, if you are not sending the "opened" events for push notifications but are using tracked links, the "Opened Push" and "Clicked Push" will occur at the same time.

We can also track opens for push notifications; to do so you need to send us an event to track it.

Clicked

The user clicked on any link from an email, when link tracking is enabled for that message. We also track clicks on individual links.

Bounced

The user's email address wasn't valid. This could be a hard bounce (usually a permanent issue like a non-existent email address) or a soft bounce (a temporary issue like a full mail box). In the case of hard bounces for emails, subsequent messages to those addresses will be given the "suppressed" status.

Converted

A message is marked as converted when an end-user meets your conversion goal and that was the last message received before the conversion goal was met, by default. You can read more about how conversions work.

Spammed

In the case of emails, this means that the end-user marked the email as 'Spam' in their email service provider. All subsequent emails are then marked "suppressed."

Suppressed

A message is marked as suppressed if:

• the email address we tried to send it to was previously a hard bounce (an invalid address), or
• the end-user marked any previous email message as spam. In this case, all subsequent email messages after the "spam" mark will be marked as "suppressed".

You can manage your suppression list with your email provider.

What we track for each message

For different types of messages, different statuses and metrics are available:

* to track push notification opens, you need to send us an event.