What metrics are typically available in ESP dashboards?
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Every ESP dashboard has the same set of core metrics. The question isn't whether they're there. It's whether you know what each one is actually telling you about your sending health.
Deliverability metrics (the health signals)
Delivery rate is the percentage of sends accepted by receiving servers. Below 95% usually means list quality issues. Bounce rate breaks down further into hard bounces (permanent failures, invalid addresses) and soft bounces (temporary failures, full mailboxes). Hard bounces accumulate reputation damage quickly. Most ESPs suppress hard-bounced addresses automatically after one or two failures.
Complaint rate is the percentage of recipients who marked your mail as spam. It's often undercounted in your ESP because Gmail doesn't send individual complaint notifications. Keep your observable rate well under 0.10%.
Engagement metrics (the interest signals)
Open rate shows how many recipients opened the email, tracked via a small pixel image. Since Apple's Mail Privacy Protection launched in 2021, iOS open rates are inflated because Apple pre-loads pixels. Treat open rate as a directional signal, not an absolute count.
Click rate (the percentage who clicked any link) is more reliable than open rate because it requires an actual action. Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is clicks divided by opens, a useful way to measure how well your content converts the people who opened.
Unsubscribe rate is the percentage who opted out. Under 0.5% per campaign is healthy. Consistently above 1% usually points to a content or frequency mismatch.
Revenue and automation metrics (on higher-tier plans)
Most mid-tier and enterprise ESPs add revenue attribution (what purchases resulted from this send) and automation performance (how triggered sequences are converting at each step). These are dashboard-dependent. A basic Mailchimp plan shows you different things than Klaviyo or a custom Brevo integration.
And if your dashboard metrics are raising questions you can't answer, the SOS hotline is free. Sometimes the data is there but the interpretation is the hard part.
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