The statistics overview page
Navigation to Statistics > Statistics Overview.
Here you can get an overview of all campaigns that have been sent in the past year.
Sent
In this example, the campaign was sent to 16,025 subscribers, which is shown in the Sent column. It is useful to see how many subscribers are scheduled for each campaign, so it can be seen how the list grows over time.
Bounces
The second column BNCS shows the number of emails that have been "bounced". A bounced email is an email that does not reach its recipient. This can have various causes, for example:
- The email is incorrect, does not exist, or has an error such as an expired domain.
- The mailbox is full (this may or may not be temporary)
- A poorly configured auto-responder (automatic mails of the type "I'm on vacation" or "I received your message and will reply soon")
The exact definition of a bounce depends on the phpList configuration, and it may take a few days for a bounce to register in the system. An email that keeps bouncing back will either not be acknowledged or will be added to the list of emails not to be sent.
A high bounce rate can be a sign of poor list quality.
In this campaign, there were 219 bounces.
Forwardings
The third column fwds shows the number of people who forwarded the mail using the phpList system ForwardToFriend. This is covered in the advanced statistics.
Unique calls
In this case, the email was "viewed" by 14,254 of the 16,025 recipients, giving an open rate of 88.54%. However, it is important to know the limitations of this statistic.
The statistic Viewed by different users:
- Tells how many people were captured opening the email (and reading the content).
- Indicates the minimum number of people who opened the email.
- Gives a rate that reflects the number of people who open an email compared to other emails we send.
- Does not say exactly how many people opened the email or what they were doing when they opened it.
Total clicks
If links were included in the campaign, phpList can interpret how many times subscribers clicked on them. This number indicates the total number of times a link was clicked, whether it was from the same subscriber or not. Also, this is the total number of clicks on all links, not on each one individually. This makes it easier to evaluate the performance of the campaign.
Unique Clicks
The Unique Clicks value is always smaller than the Total Clicks value, as it indicates the number of clicks that occurred on each link in your campaign for the first time. For example, if two links were included in the campaign and a subscriber clicked on each link 3 times, this will be displayed as "2" and not as "6".
Email open tracking accuracy.
The main cause of inaccuracy in call recording is image blocking. When images or remote content are blocked by a subscriber's email software, the action of opening the email cannot be reported back to phpList (or any other system). Blocking images is therefore commonly used by email and webmail programs as a privacy feature.
Only when the subscriber clicks on show remote content, for example, is the view recorded in the campaign statistics.
Useful statistics
This inaccuracy is the same for everyone, regardless of what software is used to send a campaign; all "open rate" averages found on the Internet or in books are subject to the same rules.
It is difficult to estimate how much higher the actual readership is, plus the inaccuracy will vary from campaign to campaign. Still, when this is taken into account, some comparisons can be made, such as "have I received more views across multiple campaigns" and "how do I compare to the industry average."
What is the difference?
The difference between actual open rates and statistics can be huge: In this case, a quick study showed that only 1 in 3 customers who purchased the cat food in the hours after the email was sent showed up in the open results, and the cat food offer was only promoted via email. In this case, the real open rate might be closer to 80%.
Rate
To compare the performance of multiple campaigns, you can use the RATE statistic, which shows the number of emails opened as a percentage of the total emails sent. The example campaign had an open rate of 25%.
Over time, as the list continues to grow, it can be compared again and again to see if subscriber interest is being maintained. Open rate statistics can also be used to:
- A/B test email titles and send times,
- compare the readership of different lists
- compare performance with the industry average.