How do you document placement issues for reporting?

A placement issue hits, open rates tank, and someone from your team or an external consultant asks: "What actually happened?" If you haven't been tracking anything, that conversation gets painful fast. Good documentation isn't just for audits. It's how you figure out what caused the problem and how you stop it happening again.

So before you build a record, it helps to understand what you're actually capturing. Placement issues come in a few shapes: a sudden drop that appears overnight, a gradual slide over weeks, or a provider-specific problem where Gmail is foldering you into spam while Outlook is fine. Each type tells a different story, and your documentation should reflect which type you're dealing with.

But Here's what a solid placement issue record looks like, in the order you'd actually build it:

1. The timeline
Note the exact date you first spotted something off. Then the point where it peaked (worst placement rates, lowest opens). Then when you started seeing recovery, if you have. Even rough timestamps help enormously when you're trying to correlate the issue with a campaign, a list import, or an authentication change.

2. Affected scope
Which campaigns were impacted? Which audience segments? Which inbox providers? A broad impact across all providers points toward reputation or authentication. A Gmail-only issue points somewhere else entirely. Knowing the scope narrows your diagnosis fast.

3. Seed test data
Seed testing gives you placement percentages over time. Inbox vs. spam vs. missing. Screenshot this or export it for the period around the issue. This is your most direct evidence that a problem existed and when it started. (No seed testing set up yet? That's worth fixing before the next incident.)

4. Postmaster Tools data
If you're sending to Gmail addresses, Google Postmaster Tools gives you domain reputation scores and spam rate data straight from Google. This is different from seed testing. Seed testing tells you what happened to your test messages. Postmaster Tools tells you what Google thinks of your domain overall. Both matter, and they tell different parts of the story.

5. Engagement metrics from your ESP
Pull open rates, click rates, and unsubscribe rates for the affected sends. A placement issue usually shows up as a drop in opens before you've even run a seed test. Compare to your baseline from the previous 30 to 90 days so the decline is visible at a glance.

6. What you did about it
List every remediation step you took and when. Paused a campaign? Noted. Updated your SPF record? Noted. Removed a segment? Noted. This matters because recovery timelines vary a lot. A reputation-based issue can take days to weeks to resolve. Knowing what you changed and when helps you understand what actually worked.

7. The outcome
Where things stand now. Are you back to normal placement? Still recovering? Did you only partially recover, which might mean a root cause you haven't fully addressed?

When you're presenting this to a consultant, your manager, or your ESP's support team, the goal is a clear before-and-after picture. A short narrative paragraph at the top ("We noticed a drop in opens on the 14th, seed testing confirmed spam foldering at Gmail starting the 12th, we identified an authentication gap and corrected it on the 15th, recovery took four days") makes the attached data far easier to read. Nobody wants to decode a spreadsheet with no context.

Still if you're in the middle of something right now and need a second opinion on what you're seeing, our SOS hotline is free. We'll look at what you've got and help you figure out where to look next.