After a blast is sent, there are a number of pieces of information we keep track of, including open rates, clickthroughs, and conversions. You can see these numbers for each of your email blasts in the Summary Reports page, accessible by clicking "summary report" in the sub-navigation of the Email Blasts tab.
The summary reports page summarizes information on each blast's open and click through rates, listing each blast by reference name and the date it was sent out.
To view the details of a specific blast, click the "details" link at the right side of that blast's listing.
For a blast that was just sent, the numbers in your summary report won't tell you much. However, the available metrics are summarized below.
There are two types of conversions rates that Salsa tracks: donor and supporter conversions. A supporter conversion rate measures the number of people who, after receiving the email, took action on one of the Salsa pages referenced in the message. For instance, if you ask your supporters to click on a link for a petition, your conversion rate will show you how many people actually followed through, not just clicking the link, but signing the petition. The donor conversion rate will tell you how many people who took to a salsa donation page and made a donation. Conversion rates are very useful for comparing emails for effectiveness, and can be used effectively in list segmenting exercises.
Click-through rate gives you a reading on the number of people who clicked a link in your HTML email. Note that these numbers only take into account HTML emails (as clickable links aren't present in text-only email messages), and that a single supporter who clicks three different links only counts as one for the purposes of calculating click-through rate.
The open rate tells you approximately how many of your supporters viewed your HTML emails. The numbers are approximate for two reasons: 1) non-HTML content, or HTML content viewed in a non-HTML email client, cannot register with our servers; and 2) email clients which do not load images by default in HTML messages cannot register. A message is registered as 'viewed' when a one pixel by one pixel transparent image is loaded by the email client, and we can only register opened messages that load the image. As with click-through rate, open rate only registers each supporter once, no matter how many times they open the message.
This indicates both the total number of messages successfully sent along with the number of failed messages. Failed messages do not mean messages which were not successfully received (which we cannot measure, other than via click through and open rate information), but messages which could not be sent due, generally, to a malformed email address in the supporter record (johnsmith@gmail, rather than johnsmith@gmail.com, for instance).
Below the Links In this Message section, you'll see a list of all the links included in that blast, with a total number of clickthroughs for each link. These clickthrough rates register one click for each supporter, no matter how many times that supporter clicks the link, but will register separate statistics for each link (clicking link one displays separately from a click on link two, even for the same supporter).
If you would like to see which of your supporters have opened your message, or who is clicking through, you can click the category names in the 'status of each email' section, to be taken to a list of the supporters in that category. As your blast goes out, the numbers in your email statistics will update
To see a particular sub-segment of the blast recipients, click the category name:
If you'd like to see how your blast did with a specific group, return to the summary report page, and choose the group from the "subsets of data" section of the page, and click the "Retrieve subset report" button. Then, click the "details" link for your blast again.
Copyright 2009 Salsa Labs, Inc.
