Apart from enabling automation, it is also essential to understand how it performs. In this article, we explain how each of the critical metrics can be checked, evaluated, and used to improve your marketing strategies.
Contents
Before you start
The Report for the automation workflow is created after the Automation is set up and enabled. If you delete the workflow, the Report will be deleted as well.
To access the Reports sections or the automation itself, the user needs to have the necessary permissions. Find more information on User roles management here.
Automation performance
Once you enable the Automation, the Edit button is replaced with View Report one. To access your automation settings, choose the Edit option from the drop-down menu.
After clicking on the Show stats, you may check the general performance of the automation. At the top bar, you can see the general stats for the automation: how many customers triggered the workflow, completed, exited, or are in the sequence at the moment.
Important! In the Automation editor, reports are showing the data collected within the last 30 days. To see the life-time performance, you will need to switch to the Reports section.
Note, the customer may exit the sequence when:
unsubscribed, reported you as spam or the email address bounced
the exit condition is satisfied (most of the automation workflows have the default trigger set to Order is Placed)
Automation got disabled
There should be no wonder why the number of customers that entered the sequence differs from those that have completed it. Since each of the delays gives more time and incentives for the customers to place the order, the difference in the number of recipients becomes more and more significant with each message sent.
You can also find more detailed information about each of the stages your customers were passing in each of the blocks settings.
Here you may see:
Sent - number of messages sent;
Opened - open rate;
Clicked - click-through rate;
Sales - sales attributed to the messages;
Completed - number of customers who passed through the workflow stage or received the message from it.
Skipped - number of customers that didn't receive the message due to the channel opt-in status.
Skipping the block means that your customer has passed to the further stage in the sequence, not receiving the message from the current block. This situation may occur if your customer didn't subscribe to receive the message through some of the channels.
Important! If you add more than one channel to the sequence, make sure you add a check-mark next to the Pass non-opted-in contact to next workflow step.
Automation Reports
After checking the general performance of the Automation, you may want to dive deeper into the stats and see what messages were sent, opened, clicked, generating sales, and more. For this information, you should jump to the Reports section by clicking on the View full report button in the Automation workflow editor or by going to the Automations section under the Reports tab.
The next page has two sections, Overview, with general information, about the email delivery statuses and Activity, with the lists of the customers filtered according to their activity.
Overview
In this section, you can see your automation performance for each of the channels within selected time frames.
The central diagram shows the number of emails sent with each of the emails you have in the flow so that you could get a quick overview of your automation performance.
In the next diagrams, the information with essential metrics for each of the channels is presented.
The information below the charts will help you understand why and when your customers have exited the sequence. All of the customers that unsubscribed, bounced, placed an order (if specified in the exit condition), or reported your email as spam after the first message was sent, will exit the sequence.
The information about your recipients' activity presented here and in the Activity tab includes:
Sent (Email, SMS, Push Notifications) represents the number of messages sent by the automation within the specified period. If you don't see your customer email address in the Activity tab, you need to review your automation settings.
Opened/Viewed (Email, Push Notification) shows the number of the opened messages, including the total and the rates for each of the messages.
Clicked (Email, SMS, Push Notifications) indicates the portion of the customers who clicked on any of the links added to each of the messages.
Orders/Sales (Email, SMS, Push Notifications) represents the number of orders, and the total value produced by the orders your customers placed after clicking on the link from the message.
Unsubscribed (Email) indicates the customers that clicked on the unsubscribe link within the email message. If your customer unsubscribes from the Email channel, the SMS message may still be sent if you have it in the sequence. The reverse is also true. Unsubscribing from the SMS channel doesn't prevent your customers from receiving Email messages.
Removed (%) (Email) indicates the total % of customers who either reported email as spam, or bounced, or unsubscribed and were removed from the workflow.
Reported spam (Email) indicates the customers that reported your emails as spam. These customers' statuses change to unsubscribe, meaning that the rest of the emails from the sequence will be skipped (except Gmail, because Gmail doesn't provide this data).
Bounced (Email) indicates the number of email hard bounces the automation has reported.
Bounced (SMS) indicates the number of the SMS hard bounces that automation has reported. More about SMS bounces here.
If your automation reports a high number of unsubscribes, spam reports, or bounces, you need to review your marketing strategies. Unlike with the Email Campaigns, it is not enough to remove inactive contacts from your account. With the Automations, we need to eliminate the source, whether it is customers providing fake email addresses to the sign-up forms or low engagement sequences, like Customer Re-Activation one. Anyway, the delays, triggers, or sign-up forms settings need to be adjusted.
Activity
If you need to check whether the email was sent to some of the customers, you may search for it using the search bar. By changing the status on the left, the report for each of the conditions can be reviewed.
To export the report to the .csv file, click on the download button.
Have any questions? Our Customer Support Team is available 24/7.
