# Email Analytics and Logs

## Email Analytics and Logs

**Email analytics in Humanic** give you a real-time, per-campaign view of how your emails are performing — from delivery and opens through clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes. Email logs give you a full audit trail of every individual send event, queryable at the contact level.

> 📌 **Suggested meta description:** *Learn how Humanic tracks email opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, and delivery events. Understand what each metric means, why open rates can be inaccurate, and how to read your email logs to debug and optimise campaigns.*

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### What Humanic Tracks — The Full Metric Set

Humanic captures six core sending events for every email dispatched through the platform. Each event is recorded at the individual contact level and aggregated at the campaign level.

| Metric           | Definition                                                   | How it's recorded                            |
| ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | -------------------------------------------- |
| **Sent**         | Total emails dispatched from Humanic's infrastructure        | Recorded at send time                        |
| **Delivered**    | Emails accepted by the recipient's mail server (not bounced) | Server-level SMTP acknowledgement            |
| **Opened**       | Email rendered by the recipient's mail client                | 1×1 invisible tracking pixel load            |
| **Clicked**      | A tracked link inside the email was followed                 | Redirect via Humanic's tracking server       |
| **Bounced**      | Email could not be delivered (hard or soft)                  | SMTP error code returned by recipient server |
| **Unsubscribed** | Recipient clicked the unsubscribe link                       | One-click unsubscribe event                  |

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### How Email Open Tracking Works

Humanic embeds a **1×1 transparent tracking pixel** — a tiny image file — in the HTML of every outgoing email when open tracking is enabled. The sequence of events is:

1. Humanic sends the email with the pixel embedded in the HTML body.
2. The recipient's mail client receives and renders the email.
3. When the mail client loads remote images, it makes an HTTP request to Humanic's tracking server to fetch the pixel.
4. Humanic's server records the request, timestamps it, and marks the email as **opened** in your analytics dashboard.
5. The pixel is invisible to the recipient — it has no effect on email appearance or content.

**Limitations of pixel-based open tracking:**

* If the recipient has images disabled in their mail client, the pixel never loads and the open is not recorded — resulting in **under-reporting**.
* Privacy tools like **Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP)** pre-fetch email images on Apple's servers *before* the recipient reads the email — resulting in **over-reporting**. This is why open rates in Humanic (and every ESP) are an approximation, not a precise count. See Why are my open rates not accurate? for a full technical breakdown.

> 💡 Humanic mitigates false opens by cross-referencing click events: if a contact clicks a link, they are counted as having opened the email even if the pixel did not fire.

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### How Email Click Tracking Works

Click tracking works through **link rewriting**. When you create a campaign, Humanic automatically replaces every hyperlink in your email content with a tracking URL that routes through Humanic's redirect server. The technical flow is:

1. The original URL (e.g., `https://yourapp.com/feature`) is replaced with a Humanic tracking URL at send time.
2. The recipient sees the link text and clicks it.
3. Their browser sends a GET request to Humanic's tracking server.
4. Humanic's server logs the click event — recording the contact ID, timestamp, link destination, and campaign ID.
5. The server issues an **HTTP 302 redirect** that forwards the recipient to the original destination in milliseconds.

Click tracking is a more reliable signal of genuine engagement than open tracking, because clicks require deliberate human action. They are harder to inflate artificially.

**Important caveats:**

* Corporate security gateways and spam filters sometimes auto-click every link in an incoming email to check for malware. These bot clicks can inflate click counts. Humanic filters known bot click signatures from your reported metrics where detectable.
* If a recipient forwards your email, clicks by the forwarded recipient are counted against the original contact record.

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### Understanding Bounce Types

Bounces are split into two distinct categories in Humanic's logs, and they require different remediation actions.

#### Hard Bounces

A **hard bounce** is a permanent delivery failure. The recipient's mail server has definitively rejected the email. Common causes:

* Email address does not exist (`550 5.1.1 — User unknown`)
* Domain does not exist or has no valid MX record
* The recipient's server has permanently blocked your sending domain

**What Humanic does:** Contacts that hard bounce are automatically suppressed from future sends. Continuing to send to hard-bounced addresses damages your sender reputation.

#### Soft Bounces

A **soft bounce** is a temporary delivery failure. The recipient's mail server accepted the connection but could not deliver the email at that moment. Common causes:

* Recipient's mailbox is full (`452 4.2.2 — Mailbox full`)
* Recipient's mail server is temporarily unavailable
* Message size exceeded the server's limit

**What Humanic does:** Soft bounces are retried automatically. If an address soft bounces repeatedly across multiple campaigns, Humanic will surface it as a deliverability risk in your audience hygiene report.

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### Delivery Rate vs. Open Rate — What's the Difference?

These two metrics are frequently confused.

**Delivery rate** = (Delivered ÷ Sent) × 100

A delivered email has been accepted by the recipient's mail server. It does not mean the email reached the inbox — it may have been placed in the spam folder. Delivery rate measures infrastructure health.

**Open rate** = (Unique Opens ÷ Delivered) × 100

An opened email has been rendered by the recipient's mail client (or, in the case of Apple MPP, pre-fetched by Apple's proxy). Open rate measures content and subject line performance — but is subject to the accuracy limitations described above.

**Click-to-open rate (CTOR)** = (Unique Clicks ÷ Unique Opens) × 100

CTOR measures content effectiveness independent of deliverability. A high open rate with a low CTOR suggests your subject line is working but your email body or CTA is not converting. CTOR is the most signal-rich of the three for diagnosing campaign copy.

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### Email Performance Benchmarks

Use these industry benchmarks to contextualise your Humanic campaign results. Benchmarks vary significantly by industry, list quality, and email type.

| Metric                  | Good   | Strong | Notes                                                     |
| ----------------------- | ------ | ------ | --------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Delivery Rate**       | >95%   | >98%   | Below 90% requires immediate deliverability investigation |
| **Open Rate**           | 20–30% | >35%   | Inflated by Apple MPP; use CTOR as primary signal         |
| **Click Rate**          | 2–4%   | >5%    | Varies heavily by CTA and audience segment                |
| **CTOR**                | 8–12%  | >15%   | Best indicator of email content effectiveness             |
| **Bounce Rate**         | <2%    | <1%    | Above 3% risks domain reputation damage                   |
| **Unsubscribe Rate**    | <0.3%  | <0.1%  | Above 0.5% signals audience or content misalignment       |
| **Spam Complaint Rate** | <0.08% | <0.03% | Google and Yahoo enforce a 0.1% threshold                 |

> ⚠️ Google and Yahoo's 2024 bulk sender requirements mandate a spam complaint rate below **0.10%** and a hard enforcement threshold of **0.30%**. Sustained breaches at the higher threshold will result in Humanic's sending infrastructure routing your domain through remediation. See Email Thresholds for full details.

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### How to Access Campaign Analytics in Humanic

1. Navigate to **Campaigns** in the left sidebar.
2. Click on any sent or active campaign to open its detail view.
3. Select the **Analytics** tab within the campaign.
4. The dashboard displays aggregate metrics: Sent, Delivered, Opened, Clicked, Bounced, and Unsubscribed counts and percentages.
5. Click any metric count to drill down into the list of individual contacts associated with that event — e.g., clicking the Clicked count shows you exactly which contacts clicked, what link they clicked, and when.

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### How to Access Email Logs

Email logs provide a **full send-level audit trail** — every individual email dispatch recorded as a timestamped event row. Logs are useful for debugging delivery issues, verifying sends to specific contacts, and confirming unsubscribe events.

1. Navigate to **Campaigns → \[Campaign Name] → Logs**, or access the unified log from the **Email Logs** section in the sidebar.
2. Each log entry contains:
   * **Timestamp** — exact date and time the event occurred
   * **Recipient email address**
   * **Event type** — Sent / Delivered / Opened / Clicked / Bounced / Unsubscribed
   * **Campaign name and email subject**
   * **Bounce reason** (if applicable — includes the SMTP error code and message)
   * **Link clicked** (for click events)
3. Use the search bar to filter logs by email address or event type.
4. Logs are retained for 90 days by default.

> 💡 If a contact reports they did not receive an email that shows as **Delivered** in your logs, the most likely cause is spam folder placement. See What if an email says delivered but the recipient has not received it? for the full diagnostic checklist.

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### Reading Your Analytics to Improve Campaigns

Your analytics data is most valuable when used as a feedback loop. Here is how to act on each signal:

**Low delivery rate (<95%):** Your domain or IP may be on a blocklist, or your contact list contains a high proportion of invalid addresses. Run a list hygiene check, verify your DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and review your Deliverability Score.

**Low open rate (<15%) with normal delivery rate:** Your subject line is not compelling enough, or your emails are landing in the spam/promotions tab rather than the primary inbox. A/B test subject lines and review your How to Avoid Spam settings.

**Low CTOR (<5%) with acceptable open rate:** Your email content, CTA, or offer is not landing with this cohort. Use Humanic's Iteration and Variation features to generate alternative email content variants and compare performance.

**High unsubscribe rate (>0.5%):** The cohort receiving this campaign is misaligned with the email's content or frequency. Tighten your cohort definition or reduce send frequency for this segment.

**Spike in hard bounces:** You have invalid email addresses in your contact list. Import a cleaned list and remove the bounced contacts. Continuing to send to invalid addresses will damage your sender domain reputation.

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### Frequently Asked Questions

**Why do my open rates seem too high?** Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) pre-fetches tracking pixels on Apple's servers before a recipient reads the email. This logs an open event even if the recipient never actually viewed the message. Up to 50% of reported opens in some audiences can be MPP-generated. Use **click rate and CTOR** as your primary engagement signals. Full explanation: Why are my open rates not accurate?

**Why do my open rates seem too low?** Some mail clients — particularly enterprise clients and older Outlook versions — block remote image loading by default. The tracking pixel never fires, and the open goes unrecorded. Humanic compensates by counting any click event as an implied open, but there will still be a floor of undetectable opens.

**Can I see which specific link a contact clicked?** Yes. In the campaign Analytics tab, click the **Clicked** count to expand the contact-level click log. Each entry shows the contact's email, the exact URL they clicked, and the timestamp.

**What is the difference between Email Analytics and Email Logs?** **Analytics** are aggregated metrics at the campaign level — totals and percentages summarised across all recipients. **Logs** are the raw event stream — one row per event per contact. Logs are for debugging and auditing; analytics are for performance monitoring.

**How long are email logs retained?** Logs are retained for 90 days. For longer-term records, export your campaign data via the CSV export function in the Analytics view.

**Does Humanic track email opens and clicks for transactional emails?** Yes. Tracking is applied to all email types sent through Humanic, including transactional emails. You can view per-email delivery and engagement status in the Email Logs section.

**If a contact unsubscribes, are they automatically removed from future campaigns?** Yes. An unsubscribe event immediately suppresses the contact across all future campaign sends in your account. The unsubscribed flag is also visible in the Contact List under the **Unsubscribed** column.

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