Reading your campaign stats
What each number on the stats page means, how to read open rates now that mail clients interfere, and the two worth acting on.
Every campaign has a stats page that fills in as the send progresses.
What each number means
- Sent. Handed to the mail system.
- Delivered. Accepted by the recipient's mail server. This is not the same as reaching an inbox: mail can be accepted and then filed as spam.
- Opens. Someone loaded the tracking pixel. Read the caution below before you act on this one.
- Clicks. Someone followed a link. The most trustworthy engagement number you have.
- Bounces. Couldn't be delivered.
- Complaints. Someone marked it as spam.
- Unsubscribes. Someone opted out.
Test sends carry a TEST badge so they stay separate from the real numbers.
How to read your open rate
Open tracking works by loading a small invisible image when a message is displayed. Since Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection in 2021, that image is often fetched automatically before anyone has read a word, and a few clients decline to load it at all.
That changed what open rates mean across the whole industry rather than on any one platform. Yours is best read as a trend line now, not a headcount. Followed across your own campaigns it still tells you plenty: a subject line that lifts opens two sends running is doing something real. Held up against a published benchmark, or against your own numbers from several years ago, it will point you the wrong way.
Clicks are the firmer signal, because a click is a deliberate act. Read the pair together. Opens give you direction, clicks give you confidence.
The two numbers that need action
- Bounce rate. Climbing bounces mean a list going stale.
- Complaint rate. Sustained complaints above roughly 0.1% need action, not observation. That's one complaint per thousand delivered.
Both are reputation signals that mailbox providers watch as closely as you do, and both take longer to recover than they took to damage.
Related: How bounces, unsubscribes, and complaints work explains what happens to those contacts. Why are my emails going to spam? is where to go when the numbers are already bad.