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Understand your outbound message stats
Understand your outbound message stats

How to find and understand what each of the statistics mean on your outbound messages.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated this week

In-app message stats explained

For every in-app message or email that you send using Intercom, you'll see some stats for it on the message page like this:

The stats you see in this example are sent, opened, clicked, goal, and replied.

We show stats to the nearest %. For example, if the actual percentage is less than 0.5%, that should appear as 0%. If the percentage is more than 0.5% (e.g. 0.6% or 0.7%), we will round up to 1%. After 1%, we just round up/down to the nearest whole number.

Sent

In-app messages are marked as sent as soon as the user matches the audience rules and has logged into your app to receive the message. The message will not count as sent until the User is online to see it.

Opened 

Messages sent in full are marked as opened as soon as they are displayed to the user. 

Your opened rates for posts and notes sent in full, should typically be above 90%, and often above 95%. At Intercom, our average opened rate for announcements is 98%.

Note: If customers have any previously unread messages, these messages will not show in full, instead they will appear as a snippet until the user clicks on the message.

Messages sent as a snippet are marked as “opened" once the user clicks on the message to open it. So the message shown below has not been “opened" yet by the user as it's still in the truncated preview state. This is why some chat messages can sometimes have very different opened rates VS sent rates.

Another reason for opened rates to be lower than expected is if a user navigates away from a page in the short gap between when the message is sent to them and when it is automatically displayed. This gap is typically in the order of seconds. This is pretty rare.

If an end-user receives a post in January and doesn't open till February, it won't show in Opened stats for February but will show for January instead.

Goal

When creating an auto message, you can set a goal to measure its effectiveness. You can see each user that matched the goal after receiving the message. Goal stats are based on messages sent.

Replied

Reply rate is simply the number of people who replied to the message. This figure is based on how many messages were sent, not on how many were opened.

Clicked

As soon as a link or button (that automatically redirects through Intercom) inside the message has been interacted with it gets marked as clicked. Clicks in embedded videos won't get marked as clicked. This figure is based on how many messages were sent, not on how many were opened.

Important: 

  • The link or button will need to redirect to Intercom to get marked as clicked. 

  • Clicking on an in-app chat to expand it doesn't count as a click. 

  • Clicking on a video's play button doesn't count as a click.

  • Clicking on unsubscribe links don't count as clicks (you'll find these under the "Failed > Unsubscribed" statistic).

  • Clicks on apps in messages aren't counted as clicks.

  • For Visitor ongoing messages, because we can’t provide a list of the people who received, opened, and clicked on a message, we only provide the links clicked breakdown.

How many "Other" links will show in the stats?

Each user can only trigger an "Other" link once. For example, if an email template has 3 links, then regardless of how many of these links the user clicks, it will only count as 1 "Other" link.

  • Clicked no links from email template = "Other" links clicked 0 times

  • Clicked 1 out of 3 links from email template = "Other" links clicked 1 time

  • Clicked 3 out of 3 links from email template = "Other" links clicked 1 time

Is it possible to pull out the unique links that are included in email templates?

No, if you add buttons/links in an email template, we will still track the clicks from users but they will all fall under the "Other" category.

Can I store full URLs in custom data attributes?

Yes, but if you try to use that particular CDA in the message, we will not be able to determine what the link is. For example, the CDA called website_url where you store the user's unique website link, and you use that CDA as a placeholder in the message (e.g. {{website_url | fallback:"www.example.com"}} ). Since we can only tell that this is a URL at the rendering/delivery stage, we cannot track it as a unique link. We will still track the clicks from users but they will all fall under the "Other" category.

Why does clicked stat show 0% on subsequent days?

The "Clicked" percentage chart displays the clicks over time, but the actual day it falls under is the day the user *received* the message, not the day they clicked. So if a user receives a message on Oct 11th and clicks on Oct 13th, the click will show under Oct 11th. This means for *fixed messages* (especially emails) that only send once, it's likely that all of the clicks will relate to the first day - the day it sent - which might be why there's a 0% click rate on subsequent days.

Is it possible to trigger click events with relative URLs?

Example, instead of putting in a URL, can I trigger click events by just using an part of the link as the URL? No! It is not possible for us to do click tracking without the http / https part of the link. In most cases, we will add the http:// for you, however if it is a URL that starts with / we do not put the http protocol in front (as there is no way that we can determine what the domain will be), and we therefore cannot track the click through via.

If I have a message with multiple buttons/links in it, can I find out which button/link they clicked?

Yes, so long as the customer has click tracking enabled. If so, the details can be seen in the Message statistics.

What if I have added two links with the exact same URL (e.g. one button at the top of the message, and one button at the bottom, but both buttons have the exact same URL)?

We are not able to distinguish these as two different links. Clicks for either of the buttons will be recorded under the one URL. The only exception for this is when there is 1 button and 1 hyperlinked image/text. We can then recognize that these are two separate links, with the same URL. The uniqueness of a link is determined by both the URL and the link type (button / hyperlinked image / hyperlinked text).

Do we track click stats for Push Messages?

No, it is not possible to add a hyperlink into the body of a push message, and we cannot track if a user opens a push message + is redirected to a URL (as this is self contained in the mobile app, and does not get redirected through Intercom).

Audience

Manual messages come with 'Audience' stats too. Your 'Audience' stats show you the number of people who match the rules for that message.

Reactions (Chats and Posts only)

A list of users that interacted with the emoji Reactions set.

Manual messages with company data

If you have a user who belongs to multiple companies and you send them a manual message containing any company data, a variation of the message will be generated for each company that the user belongs to (because the message content will be slightly different). Each variation will be immediately marked as sent, but won't be "opened" until the user is signed into that company.

Lightweight replies

Depending on which Intercom products you have, you might be sending messages with reactions. These are fun and expressive emojis you can choose as your reply type if you don’t want to manage a ton of text replies. For these messages, you can click your ‘Responded’ stat and you’ll see how many and which customers responded with each emoji.

Note: Message data is only kept for 2 years.


Email message stats explained

Email stats work largely the same as in-app messages.

  • Sent is the number of times the email was sent.

  • Opened is the % or number of emails opened, based on the sent number.

  • Replied and clicked work the same as with in-app messages in that they are based on the sent figure, not on the opened figure.

  • Failed is the % of users an email has failed to deliver to. You can click the ‘failed’ stat to see which users bounced, who unsubscribed and marked the email as spam. 

Tips to prevent your emails from failing:

  • If a lot of users have unsubscribed after receiving a particular email, you should review your message content and re-write it to be more engaging.

  • If a lot of users have marked your email as spam, you should review your message schedule and ensure you’re not sending too many messages. We recommend adding a ‘last contacted at more than 2 days’ ago filter to every message you send.

  • Or if a lot of users are bouncing, you should clear your email list of old, disengaged users (for example, some users may have changed their email address). We explain bounce rates below.

What is a bounce?

A bounce is a message which has not delivered successfully. There are two types of bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces.

A soft bounced message is a temporary failure in delivery which can be caused by mailboxes being full or mail servers being offline.

A hard bounced message is a permanent failure in delivery. For example, a message could hard bounce when: 

  • The email address does not exist on a server.

  • The domain name doesn’t exist. 

  • Or the recipient has blocked delivery.

Important: When you send a message we automatically remove addresses that hard bounce from your audience list for that message. And we don't attempt to send to those addresses again. We do this as continued attempts to deliver to invalid email addresses can harm Intercom's sending reputation.


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