What are key metrics for deliverability vs marketing performance?
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These two categories of metrics serve different purposes and belong to different owners. Mixing them up leads to either ignoring deliverability problems until they're severe, or overreacting to normal campaign variation.
Deliverability metrics (watch weekly or continuously):
- Spam complaint rate (keep below 0.10% for Gmail and Yahoo)
- Hard bounce rate (keep below 2%)
- Soft bounce rate (watch for sudden spikes)
- Inbox placement rate (% of delivered messages landing in inbox vs spam)
- Blocklist status (check domain and sending IP regularly)
- Authentication pass rates (SPF, DKIM, DMARC all passing)
Marketing performance metrics (review per campaign and monthly):
- Open rate (note: increasingly unreliable due to Apple MPP)
- Click-through rate (CTR) . the more reliable engagement signal
- Conversion rate (sales, signups, form completions)
- Revenue per email sent
- Unsubscribe rate (high rates signal content or frequency problems)
Deliverability metrics tell you whether your emails can reach the inbox. Marketing metrics tell you what happens once they're there. A campaign can show great click-through rates while deliverability problems are quietly building. By the time marketing metrics show the problem, the damage is already done.
Google Postmaster Tools is free and essential for deliverability. Your ESP dashboard handles campaign performance. For monitoring both cadences, that guide breaks down exactly which to check when.
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