Email analytics glossary

Variation

Variation is the number of variations of a campaign, differing as defined by the creator.

Calculation: Count

Emailable

Emailable is the total number of users who have an email address on record and have explicitly opted in or subscribed.

Calculation: Count

Audience %

Audience is the percentage of users who received a particular message. This number is received from Braze.

Calculation: (Number of Recipients in Variant) / (Unique Recipients)

Unique Recipients

Unique Recipients is the number of unique daily recipients, or users who received a new message in a day. For this count to increment for a user more than once, the user must receive a new message on a different day.

This number is received from Braze.

Calculation: Count

Sends

Sends is the total number of messages sent in a campaign. After launching a scheduled campaign, this metric will include all messages sent, regardless of whether they have been sent out yet due to rate limiting. This doesn’t mean the message was received or delivered to a device, only that the message was sent.

This metric is provided by Braze.

Calculation: Count

Messages Sent

Messages Sent is the total number of messages sent in a campaign. After launching a scheduled campaign, this metric will include all messages sent, regardless of whether they have been sent out yet due to rate limiting. This doesn’t mean the message was received or delivered to a device, only that the message was sent.

This metric is provided by Braze.

Calculation: Count

Deliveries

Deliveries is the total number (or percentage) of message requests that are accepted by the receiving server. This doesn’t mean the message was delivered to a device, only that the message was accepted by the server.

For emails, Deliveries is the total number of messages (Sends) successfully sent to and received by emailable parties.

Calculation: (Sends) - (Bounces)

note

For user-level received state and related logic (such as frequency capping), Braze generally marks a user when the send is processed and handed off for delivery—not when the email service provider (ESP) confirms final delivery to the inbox. That avoids timing gaps between ESP confirmation and in-product rules. It may differ from ESP- or third-party delivery reports.

Deliveries %

Deliveries % is the percentage of total number of messages (Sends) successfully sent to and received by emailable parties.

Calculation: (Sends - Bounces) / (Sends)

Bounces

Bounces is the total number of messages that were unsuccessfully delivered to the intended recipients.

For email, Bounce % or Bounce Rate is the percentage of messages that were unsuccessfully sent or designated as “returned” or “not received” from send services used or not received by the intended emailable users.

An email bounce for customers using SendGrid consists of hard bounces, spam (spam_report_drops), and emails sent to invalid addresses (invalid_emails).

note

In Braze Currents, temporary ESP deferrals are often represented as soft bounces. Deliverability tools (for example, native SendGrid reporting or Looker models) may use deferrals for the same situation. Deferrals are usually temporary, and mail is often delivered after retries. After extended retries (up to roughly 72 hours for soft bounces in campaign analytics), a message may be treated as undeliverable depending on your ESP. Currents email events are append-only—a logged soft bounce is not removed later if the message eventually delivers.

Hard Bounce

A Hard Bounce is when an email fails to deliver to the recipient due to a permanent delivery error. A hard bounce might occur because the domain name doesn’t exist or because the recipient is unknown.

When an email hard bounces or is marked as spam, Braze marks the email address as invalid but does not update the user’s subscription status. Braze stops any future sends to that email address. To remove an email address from your hard bounce list, use the Remove hard bounced emails endpoint.

Calculation: Count

Soft Bounce

A Soft Bounce is when an email fails to deliver to the recipient due to a temporary delivery error, even though the recipient’s email address is valid. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient’s inbox is full, the server was down, or the message was too large for the recipient’s inbox.

If an email receives a soft bounce, we will usually retry within 72 hours, but the number of retry attempts varies from receiver to receiver.

While soft bounces aren’t tracked in your campaign analytics, you can monitor the soft bounces in the Message Activity Log or exclude these users from your sending with the Soft Bounced segment filter. In the Message Activity Log, you can also see the reason for the soft bounces and understand possible discrepancies between the “sends” and “deliveries” for your email campaigns.

Calculation: Count

Spam

Spam is the total number of emails delivered that were marked as “spam” by the recipient. While Braze doesn’t change the subscription state of these users, these users will be automatically excluded in future emails, unless you’re sending a transactional email, which is configured to “send to all users including unsubscribe”.

Unique Opens

Unique Opens is the total number (or percentage) of delivered messages that have been opened by a single user at least once and are tracked over a seven-day period.

For email, this is tracked over a seven-day period. This means a single user who opens the same email again after seven days counts as a new unique open. As a result, dashboard unique open counts may be higher than a simple DISTINCT user_id query on Currents data. To match dashboard counts from Currents, filter for events where is_unique is true.

Unique Clicks

Unique Clicks is the distinct number of recipients who have clicked a link within a message at least once and is measured by dispatch_id.

This is tracked over a seven-day period for email and measured per dispatch_id (a single send attempt). This includes clicks on Braze-provided unsubscribe links. Tracked custom unsubscribe URLs also count toward Unique Clicks when a user selects the link. After seven days, another unique click counts for the same user if they click again. Dashboard email engagement metrics, including Unique Clicks, are calculated in Braze and are not reconciled from ESP aggregate reports. To match dashboard counts from Currents, filter for events where is_unique is true.

Unexpected links on the email heatmap

When the email heatmap shows links you do not expect, inspect the message HTML for content blocks or spacing between words that create tracked URLs. Use the Link Table by Total Clicks on the heatmap view to identify URLs that do not match visible copy.

Total Clicks

Total Clicks is the total number of times users clicked links in the delivered email, including multiple clicks by the same user. This includes clicks on Braze unsubscribe links and tracked custom unsubscribe URLs.

When Total Clicks is much higher than Unique Clicks, security tools or mailbox providers scan links without users opening the message. Compare Unique Clicks when you evaluate engagement internally.

Unsubscribers or Unsub

Unsubscribes reflect the standard unsubscribe link for Braze. Custom unsubscribe pages won’t increment this metric unless you update users using the API. Subscription Group Timeseries still reflects API-driven changes.

Unsubscribers or Unsub is the number of messages resulting in an unsubscription. Unsubscriptions occur when Braze processes an unsubscribe from the Braze unsubscribe URL in the message body or from the list-unsubscribe header when that path is handled by Braze.

Why Unsubscribes and unsubscribe-link clicks can differ

On the Analytics page for an email campaign or Canvas, compare the Unsubscribes count to clicks on the Braze unsubscribe URL in the per-link breakdown when you expand Total Clicks or Unique Clicks. The two often match but can differ:

• More Unsubscribes than clicks on the body unsubscribe URL: List-unsubscribe is an additional unsubscribe path in the email header (not the link in your message body). When a user unsubscribes that way, it counts toward Unsubscribes but does not count as a click on the tracked unsubscribe URL in the body.
• More clicks on the body unsubscribe URL than Unsubscribes: A user may select that link more than once. If they unsubscribe, resubscribe, and unsubscribe again, email analytics can record multiple clicks (for example, two) in the click breakdown.

For more information, see Why am I seeing a different number of unsubscribes than clicks on my unsubscribe link?.

Revenue

Revenue is the total revenue in dollars from campaign recipients within the set primary conversion window.

Calculation: Count

Primary Conversions (A) or Primary Conversion Event

Primary Conversions (A) or Primary Conversion Event is the number of times a defined event occurred after interacting with or viewing a received message from a Braze campaign. This defined event is determined by you when building the campaign.

For email, push, and webhooks, we start tracking conversions after the initial send.

Confidence

Confidence is the percentage of confidence that a certain variant of a message is outperforming the control group.

Machine Opens

Machine Opens includes the proportion of “opens” that are affected by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) for iOS 15. For example, if a user opens an email using the Mail app on an Apple device, this will be logged as a Machine Opens.

This metric is tracked starting November 11, 2021 for SendGrid and December 2, 2021 for SparkPost.

Calculation: Count

Other Opens

Other Opens includes emails that haven’t been identified as Machine Opens. For example, when a user opens an email on another platform (such as Gmail app on a phone, Gmail on desktop browser), this will be logged as an Other Opens.

Note that a user can also open an email (such as the open counts toward Other Opens) before a Machine Opens count is logged. If a user opens an email once (or more) after a machine open event from a non-Apple Mail inbox, then the amount of times that the user opens the email is calculated toward Other Opens and only once toward Unique Opens.

Calculation: Count

Estimated Real Opens

Estimated Real Opens is an estimate of how many unique opens there would be if machine opens did not exist, and is the result of a proprietary Braze statistical model.

Braze recalculates this estimate as new open and click data arrives. The value typically stabilizes a few days after send but continues to update when new qualifying events occur.

Click-to-Open Rate

Click-to-Open Rate is the percentage of opened emails that have been clicked by a single user or machine at least once, and is only available in the Report Builder.

Calculation: (Unique Clicks) / (Unique Opens) (for Email)

Message Open Likelihood scores (segmentation)

The Message Open Likelihood segment filter scores how likely a user is to open email on a scale of 0–100%. Users without enough send or open history for the channel appear as blank. For email, machine opens are excluded from the calculation, which uses recent message history on that channel (see Message Open Likelihood filter for individual channels).